Dear Mr. Hoagland,
It has been almost six years since I first approached you concerning the
mathematical evidence that you have presented to the public concerning
the Cydonia issue. Perhaps it is finally time for you to seriously consider
my criticism of that evidence. I intend to challenge you to a debate in
the next two or three months. I will then propose a written debate to take
place at a mutually agreeable location on the internet. In the meantime,
I ask you to do two things. First of all, I urge you to carefully read
the relevant essays on my homepage. They have been there for a long time
and I know that you are aware of their existence. The principal one has
the following URL:
http://www.math.washington.edu/~greenber/DMPyramid.html
In that essay you will also find
links for other closely related essays.
Secondly, I strongly urge you to consult other mathematicians or statisticians
who, like myself, have devoted their lives to studying various subtle mathematical
issues. You can certainly find such individuals in the mathematics or statistics
departments of a nearby university. I suggest that you pay them to take
the time necessary to examine your mathematical evidence, to listen to
your explanations, to read my critical essays, and to give you their own
objective evaluation. I hope that you will listen carefully, and with an
open mind, to what they tell you. I believe that you will find absolutely
no support for your evidence among those individuals. Perhaps you will
then realize that my criticism has been valid all along. If so, and you
are finally willing to discard that evidence, as I advised you to do a
long time ago, and you are willing to acknowledge publicly that you have
been wrong about it, then there will no longer be a need for a debate.
As you must know, I am a mathematician who is highly respected within the
mathematical community. My many research papers have been published in
top international journals. Those papers contain theorems and conjectures
which are the product of careful thought, in many cases over a period of
years. If another mathematician approached me with the opinion that one
of my theorems or proofs or conjectures was wrong in some way, I would
take that extremely seriously. I would absolutely have to know if something
that I believed to be correct, and even published, was actually, or possibly,
wrong. It would certainly be upsetting to me to make a serious blunder,
and potentially embarrassing, but that would not matter. It would be an
obligation to the mathematical community and to myself to find out. Similarly,
if I found a serious error in the work of another mathematician, or a scholar
in a different field who uses mathematical arguments, I would feel equally
obligated to bring that error to his or her attention and I would rightfully
expect a substantive response.
You do not publish in scholarly journals. Instead you put your ideas forward
to the general public. But I do not see why a different standard should
apply. In the Fall of 1996, I wrote several letters to you about what you
refer to as the "Geometry of Cydonia." I received no response. It seemed
to me that you simply turned a deaf ear to my criticism. In 1998, I challenged
you to a debate. Art Bell confronted you with my challenge on the air.
You responded with unjustified insults. Several months later your assistant
Michael Bara wrote an article entitled "Orwell and the Internet" which
was placed on your website. That article went beyond mere insults. Bara
referred to my criticism (which also dealt with the Europa issue, still
unresolved to this day) as "poison" and "mendacities." He juxtaposed those
remarks with quotes from Hitler and a photo of Goebbels and Hitler.
What happened at that time was offensive and totally unacceptable. Nevertheless,
I decided to patiently persist in challenging the mathematical evidence
that you have used to influence your audience - the readers of THE MONUMENT
OF MARS, the attendees at your lectures, and, of course, the listening
audience for the Art Bell Show. In mid-1999, I created my own website including
some of the essays alluded to above and a shorter form of the essay about
the D&M Pyramid. I expanded that essay at the end of 1999, and it has
been there ever since, at the above URL, and with no essential changes.
I know that you are aware of my essays, but you have never responded to
the substance of my criticism. I believe that what I explain there is devastating
to your evidence. Let me just mention one of the many points that I make.
The "relationship model" put forward by you and Erol Torun for the D&M
pyramid is contradictory. That is, it is impossible to design a pyramid
incorporating all, or even most, of those relationships to the level of
accuracy one would expect of an architect's design for a structure, especially
such a massive structure. This point certainly deserves a substantive response
from you, but, quite frankly, I myself do not see how you could respond
in a way that deals squarely with that crucial issue. Perhaps you can find
a way. In a debate, I assure you that a facile answer on your part will
not be successful.
It is clear that you have found this mathematical evidence useful in influencing
the opinions of your audience. All of those mathematical constants mysteriously
showing up when you take ratios of angles, and radians, and compute values
of trigonometric functions. I imagine that that may look very impressive
to many people and make it seem that the case for artificiality is far
stronger than it really is. This has undoubtedly helped you to build up
a following and to promote your agenda concerning Cydonia by getting people
to write letters and faxes to NASA officials, thereby putting some pressure
on NASA to provide more and more images of Cydonia. Perhaps this has even
been an effective strategy for that purpose, but I do not believe that
the end justifies the mean. As I see it, you are using mathematics to fool
people, perhaps fooling yourself at the same time, and it is a fundamentally
divisive strategy.
As you certainly realize, it would be extremely difficult for most people
to really evaluate that mathematical evidence, one way or the other. Yet
you use it to influence people's opinions. When a real mathematician comes
along to object, and even takes the time to write an essay explaining the
basis for the objection, you show nothing but indifference.
Ostensibly, your objective has been, or should have been, to get scientists
at NASA to take the Cydonia issue seriously. Presenting fallacious mathematical
evidence is obviously not an effective way to do that. It merely gives
scientists, who often have considerable background in mathematics, an easy
excuse for dismissing the whole issue. For that reason alone, you should
be deeply concerned about whether or not my objections are valid.
It may be costly for you to follow my suggestion of hiring some qualified
individuals to examine your mathematical evidence and my critique of that
evidence. I feel that you have an absolute obligation to take my criticism
seriously and to look into this issue thoroughly. From my perspective,
you are absolutely wrong. I am asking you to care about that possibility.
Sincerely yours,
Ralph Greenberg
cc
The following letter was sent
to Richard Hoagland on August 28th, 2002.
Michael Bara
Art Bell
Phillip Christenson
Richard Grossinger
Linda Moulton Howe
David Livingston
George Noory
Barbara Simpson
The D&M Pyramid on Mars
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