1. The “Ark” Hypothesis
While any survey of
Hoagland’s Moon With A View paper could
not possibly do it justice, no survey of the Iapetus anomalies that
he so carefully catalogued in the over two hundred pages of
analysis in that paper would not be complete without a brief
mention of his own hypotheses for explaining the presence of this
most extreme of all the anomalies in the solar system. Hoagland
boils the main points of his argument for Iapetus’ artificial
origins down to three basic facts, or as he calls them,
“exhibits”:
Exhibit #1: the baffling, highly geometric, precisely equatorial ~60,000-foot-high “Iapetus Wall.”656Exhibit #2, the equally astonishing, equally unnatural rectilinear geometry - evident all across the surface of this “moon.”657Exhibit #3, without doubt our most astonishing Iapetus discovery - unique (so far...) in the entire solar system:That, instead of being spherical - as natural moons larger than about 250 miles across must be (due to inexorable gravitational contraction) - the overall 900-mile-wide form of Iapetus is highly geometric... specifically, apparently an eroded truncated isocahedron!658
Viewing this
planetary anomaly against the background of Van Flandern’s Exploded
Planet Hypothesis, Hoagland advances his first hypothesis:
That, this extraordinary object was deliberately constructed as an “ark” — an artificial, world-sized spacecraft, designed to rescue as many as possible from the imminent, hyperdimensional explosion of an entire world, the destruction of a former major member of the sun’s planetary system which now no longer exists: Planet V. An event which would have inevitably, disastrously, affected the very existence of even an extremely advanced, solar system wide civilization...which we (and others) - based on a myriad of accumulating evidence - have proposed arose long before us...literally millions of years ago.659
But there is another,
more disturbing possibility, one that perhaps the reader has
already recognized, an imagery that comes from our own contemporary
“mythologies”, and the fertile story-telling imagination of one of
film-making’s most celebrated producers and
directors...