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From: UFO UpDates - Toronto <updates@globalserve.net>
Date: Sun, 13 Apr 1997 12:04:11 -0400
Fwd Date: Sun, 13 Apr 1997 12:04:11 -0400
Subject: The Continually Amazing Richard Hoagland - Europa




Original Europa Thesis Just Too Alien
by Terence Dickinson

The Sunday Star - Toronto, April 13, 1997
Context Section, page F8


At a news conference Wednesday, NASA scientists presented the
latest images from the Galileo spacecraft that is in orbit around
Jupiter. The photos, showing yawning cracks and blocks of ice the
size of house on Jupiter's moon, Europa, offer the most
compelling evidence yet that there is an ocean of water, possibly
harboring life, beneath the frozen surface of this world, which
is roughly the size of the Earth's moon.

It's a strange story, but 18 years ago I was there when the first
person on Earth realised what Europa is really like. It was July
10, 1979, just hours after the American space probe Voyager 2 had
cruised near Jupiter and its family of 16 moons. I was standing
beside science writer Richard Hoagland at Voyager mission control
at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California,
gazing intently at one of the television monitors displaying
Voyager 2 images of Europa.

Nobody had ever seen anything like Europa before, Instead of the
usual cratered landscape, Europa's surface is smooth, like a
billiard ball. The highest resolution images did reveal some
detail - low ridges and linear features covering the surface in
apparently random patterns - but at first glance it was baffling.
Then Hoagland said, almost in a whisper, "Its a crust of ice. And
there's water below it."

He stood there, thinking about what he had just said, then asked
me if I would be interested in an article on the idea. At the
time, I was editor of 'Star & Sky', an American popular-level
astronomy magazine that has long since ceased publication. I
readily accepted.

Later, as he was working on the article, Hoagland phoned me from
his home in Oakland, California, to tell me, with growing
enthusiasm, about how all the pieces fit. Europa, he said, had a
rocky core that was heated by gravitational tugging from
Jupiter's three other large moons. As those moons swung close to
Europa, then retreated, the varying gravitational forces squeezed
and relaxed the rocky core, heating it in the process.

This, he said, would melt the icy crust that apparently cloaks
the Jovian moon. Only the outer surface, which is exposed to the
intense cold of space, remains frozen. The ocean below could
easily contain more water than is in Earth's oceans. And like in
Earth's oceans, he went on, life could exist near volcanic vents.

Hoagland's ideas about Europa appeared as the cover story in the
January, 1980, issue of 'Star & Sky'. Given the potential
importance of the concept, I issued a news release to coincide
with the issue's publication. It was picked up by all the major
news services and the story ran in hundreds of newspapers. It
appeared in 'The Toronto Star' on December. 27, 1979, under the
headline 'By Jupiter! Maybe there is alien life in space'.

Then, instead of Hoagland's ideas appearing in textbooks, NASA
brochures and other publications about the solar system, they
were ignored. Today, Hoagland almost never receives credit for
his Europa work. Why? He was never part of establishment science
and he has moved much further from it than he was back in 1979.
Today, he champions the idea that aliens built a rock formation
called the 'face' on Mars. Few scientists want to be even
remotely associated with a "kook", no matter how brilliant his
ideas.

EOA

(Terence Dickinson is editor of 'Skynews Magazine' and the author
 of several guidebooks for backyard astronomers)