Richard Charles Hoagland (born April 25, 1945) is an American author, former science advisor for CBS News and a proponent of various conspiracy theories about NASA, lost alien civilizations on the Moon, and on Mars and other related topics. Hoagland has been documented to misappropriate others' professional achievements and has been described as a conspiracy theorist and pseudoscientist.
Background Hoagland has no education beyond the high school level. According to Hoagland's curriculum vitae, he has no advanced training, schooling, or degrees in any scientific field. Hoagland asserts he was a Curator of Astronomy and Space Science at the Springfield Science Museum, 1964–1967, and assistant director at the Gengras Science Center in West Hartford, Connecticut, 1967–1968, and was a Science Advisor to CBS News during the Apollo program, 1968–1971. In July 1968, Hoagland filed a copyright registration for a planetarium presentation and show script called The Grand Tour. A popular planetarium lecturer at the Springfield Science Museum, Hoagland produced a program called "Mars: Infinity to 1965" to coincide with the Mariners 3 and 4 missions. He designed a room with special equipment to display the relative positions of the Earth, Mars, and the Mariners during their trip and thereafter contracted with NASA to relay the pictures of the Martian surface, on a near-live-feed, to the general audience. Hoagland co-hosted a radio program for WTIC (AM) in Hartford, Connecticut, The Night of the Encounter, along with Dick Bertel, covering the July 14, 1965 Mariner 4 flyby of the planet Mars. Local newspapers had noted the radio broadcast to be history's first laser audio transmission. In 1976, Hoagland, an avid Star Trek fan, initiated a letter-writing campaign that successfully persuaded President Gerald Ford to name the first Space Shuttle the Enterprise, replacing the previously slated name for the prototype vehicle, Constitution. Hoagland authored the book The Monuments of Mars: A City on the Edge of Forever (published in 1987) and co-authored the book Dark Mission: The Secret History of NASA, which was ranked 21st on November 18, 2007, on The New York Times Best Seller list for paperback nonfiction. Richard Grossinger, the founder of North Atlantic Books, writes that Monuments became the most successful title published by North Atlantic, and that at its peak the book sold over 2000 copies per month. Grossinger also reports that Hoagland wrote much of the book while in Los Angeles County jail. Hoagland runs the Enterprise Mission website, and has described the Enterprise Mission as "an independent NASA watchdog and research group ... attempting to figure out how much of what NASA has found in the solar system over the past 50 years has actually been silently filed out of sight as classified material, and therefore totally unknown to the American people." Hoagland appeared regularly as the "Science Advisor" for Coast to Coast AM, a late-night radio talk show, until being replaced by Robert Zimmerman in July 2015. While Hoagland makes frequent reference to his receipt of the "International Angstrom Medal for Excellence in Science" in August 1993, the organization that awarded the medal, The Angstrom Foundation Aktiebolag, founded by Lars-Jonas Ångström, was not authorized by Uppsala University or the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences to make use of the academy's Anders Jonas Ångström memorial medal. The academy has long authorized only Uppsala University to use its medal for the Ångström's Prize (Ångströms premium), awarded yearly by Uppsala professors to physics students. Mr. Ångström stated in May 2000 that although his award to Hoagland was a mistake, he acted with good faith and with good intentions.
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