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Hoagland's Credentials
Contents of this page
- Introduction to Hoagland's Claimed Credentials
- Was Hoagland the First to Think of Life in Europa's Ocean?
- Did Hoagland First Think of the Pioneer Plaque?
- The Angstrom Medal
- Conclusions
Introduction to Hoagland's Claimed Credentials
This page deals with a delicate topic: Hoagland's credentials. It's delicate for many reasons, but two are paramount. One is that I have debated many pseudoscientists in many venues, and in all of them, I have stuck with the issue of science. In many of these debates, I have been attacked personally, called such things as a disinformation agent, a government spook, a NASA lackey, and so on. Despite these and sometimes even more vicious attacks, I have never attacked the person who attacked me. So writing a page about someone's credentials is something I approach with some care.The second reason is that in general, the issue of the person's background is important, but not critical. For example, some Planet X proponents brag that they have no education in science. They claim it allows them to think "outside the box" when in reality it only allows them to say blatantly incorrect things about even the most basic scientific facts. But even someone not educated in science can make valid observations.
But what if someone has a history of stretching the truth? In court, if a witness is known to have lied multiple times in the past, then their testimony is suspect. They are not necessarily lying this time, but it certainly is something to consider. So looking at credentials can be pertinent.
Credentials work the other way, too. A lot of people simply believe what I say because I have a PhD in astronomy. I am adamant on this site that people not simply believe what I say; they should find out what other evidence exists. But having an advanced degree in astronomy means I have a pretty good background in science, and that in general I do understand the basics of what I am talking about.
So if someone comes along and says they have a lot of impressive credentials, then people are more likely to believe what they say. This is the very reason I wrote this page. Hoagland makes a lot of claims about his credentials. At least some of these claims are true. As I show below (and as others have shown before me), not all of these claims are as true as others. Hoagland uses these claims to make him seem more legitimate; when he is introduced on the "Coast to Coast AM" radio show, for example, these credentials are trotted out. As you can see from reading this page, those should be taken with a substantially large grain of salt.
Was Hoagland the First to Think of Life in Europa's Ocean?
Europa is a moon of Jupiter. It's roughly the same size as our own Moon.
However, it's pretty different from what we're used to! When the Voyager
probes took images of Europa, most astronomers were surprised to find
that it looked like Europa was covered with a sheet of ice, with evidence
that underneath that ice was liquid water! Years later,
observations by the Galileo probe confirmed this. Most astronomers now
have little doubt the ocean exists, though there is a lot of arguing
about how deep it is, its composition, etc.
This result is very exciting, because biologists think life on Earth got started in liquid water, and most life needs liquid water to survive. An ocean of water on Europa has obvious implications...
If life exists on another planet or moon, then whoever thought of this idea first will get some credit for it. Anyone claiming they thought of it first could say this to help bolster their credibility. Enter Hoagland.
Hoagland has claimed that he was the first to think of the ocean under Europa's ice, and also that he was the first to think of the idea that there might be life there as well. In his own words:
|
Shortly after the first NASA unmanned Voyager mission
to Jupiter, in March, 1979, Richard C. Hoagland published
in Star & Sky magazine a radical new theory ...
Hoagland proposed that a planet-wide ocean still exists under the tens-of-miles-thick sulphur-tinged ice now completely covering Europa. Further, that in that extremely ancient ocean -- the only other planetary "near-by" liquid water that may have persisted from the beginnings of the solar system (other than on Earth)-- Life may have once originated ... an alien type of life that -- because of the present uniqueness of Europa in the entire solar system -- currently might still exist |
Note the use of words like "Hoagland proposed", which strongly implies Hoagland is claiming credit for originating these ideas. He goes even further...
|
At the time, Hoagland's theory [emphasis mine] encountered
overwhelming opposition from almost everyone at NASA...
Based on Hoagland's startling theory [emphasis mine], Clark [sic] two years later would create a sequel to his most famous work ("2010: Odyssey Two" -- after long claiming that such a follow-on was "impossible")... In the acknowledgments to "2010," Clark would write: "The fascinating idea that there might be life on Europa, beneath ice-covered oceans kept liquid by the same Jovian tidal forces that heat Io, was first proposed by Richard C. Hoagland in the magazine Star & Sky ('The Europa Enigma,' January, 1980). This quite brilliant concept has been taken seriously by a number of astronomers... and may provide one of the best motives for the projected GALILEO Mission..." |
He also quotes an article in the Toronto Star, which says
| In late 1979, a science writer in the United States named Richard Hoagland first broached the idea that there might be life under the ice there. |
It can't get any clearer than that. These are all quotations from Hoagland's website. In that last one, for example, by not saying the article is wrong, Hoagland is saying he thought of life in Europa's ocean first. Incidentally, on that page, Hoagland bizarrely put up an email he got from the author of that article saying that Hoagland is in violation of copyright laws, and to remove the article. Hoagland laughs this off with the line, "Opps[sic]! I guess Jay [the author] doesn't want any more exposure" and keeps the copyrighted material on his site! Why would an author of an article write an angry letter to someone whom he supported in that very article?
So on Hoagland's own page he is claiming that he thought of the ocean first, and that he thought of life first. There really is no other way to interpret those statements, written on Hoagland's own website. He then quotes Arthur C. Clarke, who clearly says "was first proposed by Richard C. Hoagland". Nowhere on that page does Hoagland ever say Clarke gives him too much credit.
Then, on the Coast to Coast AM radio show (as quoted by Ralph Greenberg), Hoagland himself said:
|
ART BELL: Richard, you are I believe originally noted for your
investigation into the monuments of Mars, and then, following
that, artifacts that you have shown on the moon.
RICHARD HOAGLAND: Well actually, even before that, back in the 1980's I was looking very hard at a little moon of Jupiter called Europa, and when I was covering the Voyager story out at JPL in the Summer of 1980, actually the Spring of 1979 and the Winter of 1980, we flew this extraordinary spacecraft, NASA did, by Jupiter for the first time and encountered the four moons, you know, Io, Ganymede, Europa, Callisto, and Jupiter itself, and it was as part of that observation that I began work on essentially what turned out to be the first scientific paper [emphasis mine], which ultimately appeared in Star and Sky Magazine in the beginning of 1980, which was a prognostication, pulling all the data together, that there might be a global ocean under the ice cover that Voyager had revealed and that in that global ocean there actually might be some extant living life forms. |
He says, from his own mouth, that he published the first scientific paper that there might be an ocean, and life in it.
So let me be clear:
This establishes that Hoagland says he was the first to propose an ocean under Europa's ice, and that there might be life there.
So, was he really the first? No, he wasn't. Hoagland's claims in this case are at best misleading.
First, while Star and Sky was a fine magazine, it was not a scientific journal. It was a popular magazine for amateur astronomers and astronomy enthusiasts. I have written for several magazines such as that myself, and writing for them is an entirely different matter than writing a scientific journal article. So right away, Hoagland claiming this is a "scientific paper" is a pretty big stretch of the truth.
Second, the idea of oceans on or in the moons of Jupiter had been around for many years before Hoagland published his article. John Lewis, a scientist at the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at the University of Arizona published an article in 1971 about this in volume 15 of Icarus, a (scientific!) journal of planetary sciences. The article was entitled "Satellites of the Outer Planets: Their Physical and Chemical Nature". At the time, his arguments were based on somewhat incomplete data, but later he published a paper (with Guy Consolmagno) which appeared in 1976 in the book "JUPITER: Studies of the interior, atmosphere, magnetosphere, and satellites" (edited by T. Gehrels) which gives better details of the moons' interiors. This clearly establishes that Lewis thought of this ocean idea before Hoagland did.
Third, what about Hoagland's claim that he thought of life in those oceans first as well? Guess what-- he's wrong there too. As Dr. Ralph Greenberg says on his page about the history of the concept of life in Europa:
|
"On
June 19th and 20th, 1979, the conference "Life in the Universe"
took place at NASA's Ames Research Center. Benton Clark gave a
lecture [titled] Sulfur: Fountainhead of Life in the Universe...
Clark then explained how sulfur could play the role of oxygen, and that deep-sea volcanic emissions could potentially provide all the necessary ingredients for a self-sustained ecosystem. In the final part of his lecture, Clark raised the possibility that life might exist in undersurface oceans [emphasis mine] on the icy satellites in our Solar System, including Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto in particular. |
Greenberg goes on:
| In his book Brother Astronomer - Adventures of a Vatican Scientist, published in 2000, Consolmagno gives an account of a conversation that he had with Carl Sagan just before he was to present his work on the models for oceans on the Galilean satellites at a conference about Jupiter in 1975. Consolmagno suggested to Sagan that such oceans might be places to look for life. |
Note the dates: mid-1979, before Hoagland's paper, and 1975, long before. Hoagland might argue that he was writing his paper at the same time as the first conference, but Consolmagno still beat him by 5 years.
Greenberg still goes on:
| "Those discoveries on Earth (black smokers), together with the theories of possible oceans on Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto, inspired some individuals to already make the link in the late 1970s. One notable example is the physicist Gerald Feinberg, who came to this idea early in 1979, and realized that a theory that he had developed with the biochemist Robert Shapiro (presented in their book Life Beyond Earth, published in 1980) might explain how life could develop deep in those Galilean oceans...." |
So, we see that Hoagland was neither the first to think of an ocean on Europa, nor was he the first to think of life there! So why does he continue to make these claims?
In the November/December 2000 issue of "Skeptical Inquirer" Gary Posner took Hoagland to task for this and other claims Hoagland had made. Posner in fact cites Greenberg, as I have done above. Bizarrely, ironically, Mike Bara, who commonly writes the articles on Hoagland's site,