Table of Contents
Authors Note
For purposes of historical clarity, the authors have chosen to describe certain events in third person. We did not begin working together until 1998, and a substantial portion of the events described in this book took place in the 1980s and early 1990s before the authors began their collaboration. For that reason, you will frequently read in these pages that Hoagland did this or Hoagland discovered that, simply so we can differentiate for the reader more precisely who did what, and when. For the most part, events described that took place after 1998 will refer to the authors or we when characterizing our participation in certain events. We understand this editorial mechanism may be distracting to readers, but we felt it was the best way to deal with the problem.
[Update 2009]
Revelation
Mike Bara
In the two calendar years since the publication of the first edition of Dark Mission, a great deal of new information has come to light that not only reinforces the case we made in that initial volume, it demonstrates that Dark Mission has had a significant political impact despite being systematically ignored by most of the mainstream American media.
Aside from personal attacks made against my co-author Richard C. Hoagland by an aerospace industry website known as The Space the media has been mostly silent about Dark Mission. The Space Review. com hit-piece was written by a shameless hack named Dwayne A. Day. He, like Oberg, has so many NASA connections on his resume that he may as well be an official press officer for the Agency. He claimed, among other absurdities, that Richard had a harem of older women fans and that he lived in a compound with them. As I can personally attest, my co-author lives with his girlfriend of more than 10 years, Dr. Robin Falkov, in a comfortable house in suburban Albuquerque.
Even Obergs direct intervention in getting Dr. Johnston dismissed from his unpaid position as a JPL Solar System Ambassador failed to ignite any interest among the media elite. A publicist we hired to help arrange media interviews gave up after four months, stating that she had never encountered such monolithic opposition to what she considered a well-crafted and ideally positioned work. Despite having direct talks with Larry King himself, who fondly remembered Richard as a great guest from his appearance on Kings CNN show in the early 1990s, arrangements for a show dedicated to the issues raised by Dark Mission evaporated when Kings producer stonewalled it, with no reason given. This was despite the fact that King did numerous shows on subjects like the latest UFO sightings and Bigfoot throughout 2008. Similarly, a feature piece written by an impressed senior staff writer at People magazine was also spiked at the last minute.
And so on.
This is not to say there werent a few brave souls who stepped up to the plate and took the heat for having us on. George Noory, host of the highly popular Coast to Coast AM radio program could not have been more supportive, and the many shows George allowed Richard and me to participate in were a huge boon to the relatively modest sales figures of Dark Mission. Dennis Miller gave Richard almost an hour to make his case and was fair-minded and generous in his evaluation. Likewise, Margaret Wendt and Joel Martin of The Spiritual Truth radio program were very supportive along with a few other internet radio programs in spreading the word. But beyond that, there wasnt much.
Of course, the usual suspects, as Richard likes to call them, couldnt resist trying to defame us and Dark Mission in anyway they could. There were numerous one-star reviews on Amazon.com from people who obviously hadnt even read the book, including NASA/JPL scientist Geoffrey A. Landis, who failed to notice that he was mentioned in the book several times. An anonymous reviewer calling himself Professor Fulcaneli tried to attack Dark Mission by misquoting us and attacking us for various claims we had never made. He finished the whole thing off by comparing us to Nazi sympathizers.
So, it was something of a surprise when the Russian media displayed a tremendous enthusiasm for Dark Mission, especially right after Richard and Ken Johnstons press conference at Washington DCs National Press Club in October, 2007. Various Russian media outlets interviewed Richard and Ken on several occasions, flying out from Moscow to conduct extensive interviews.
Likewise, I was personally very gratified when Sergeant Major Robert O. Dean (Ret.), told me at the 2008 Bay Area UFO Expo that he had personally given copies to upper level staff at the Pentagon, and that it had been very well received. This independently echoes one of Richards long-time intel sources who admitted hed bought over 70 copies of Dark Mission to give to colleagues in the American intelligence, military and space communities along with his contacts in the Russian government.
During the course of our first years in circulation, as you would expect, the story didnt stand still. Something of a mini-media sensation was caused in 2008 when self-anointed Bad Astronomer Dr. Phil Plait made a very public stink about a tiny object that appeared in a Mars rover image and looked for all the world like a small statue or figurine. Despite Dr. Phil protesting a bit too much, the figurine and the Spirit rover image it was spotted on got more and more intriguing by the day.
This was followed by new independent research papers supporting the hyper-dimensional physics theory we outlined in Chapter Two of Dark Mission, and amazing new images of the asteroid 2867 Steins and Mars moon Phobos. Both of these data sets provided fresh fortification for our case, as both objects show unmistakable signatures of artificial origin. All of these developments will get full play in our follow-up volume, Dark Mission II - The Secret Space Program, due next year.
We also continued to do additional research on key points we first raised in Dark Mission. One subject I decided to go back and re-research was the now infamous communion ceremony that Buzz Aldrin performed in the lunar module Eagle before the astronauts made their first historic steps on the Moon. As we told you in the first edition, this precise moment corresponded with a significant stellar alignment of Sirius, literally the Egyptian goddess Isis incarnate, rising over the Tranquility Base landing site at 19.5. This finding eventually led us to create the Ritual Alignment Model, which asserts that NASA has planned major mission objectives around the positions of the stars and planets over various landing sites and events. As I did my follow-up research, I found some interesting new information that reinforced and deepened the mystery.
According to Aldrins original account in his autobiography Men from Earth, the communion ceremony took place during the first idle moment in the LM before eating our snack. In Dark Mission, we had presumed that this ceremony took place exactly 33 minutes after the landing of Eagle on the lunar surface, during an odd one-minute long com break at that point in the mission. (The significance of the 33 minute timing should be obvious if youve read Chapter Five). First Man, Neil Armstrongs 2005 authorized biography, also discusses the communion ceremony but places it at different time.
