It might seem a bit off the wall to start out a book review by talking about a TV show, but honestly, that’s the only way I can do it.

One of my all-time favorite series of episodes in one of my all-time favorite shows featured Dennis Dugan as Captain Freedom in “Hill Street Blues.” The Captain showed up in full goofball superhero costume one day and drove Bruce Weitz’ Mick Belker character bonkers for four of the best episodes ever aired on network TV.

The thing about the Captain, though, was that he would start a beautiful speech that had Mick (and the audience) believing, or having their heartstrings tugged, or sympathizing… and then he’d end it by going completely off the deep end without a break in the narrative.

The book Dark Mission: The Secret History of NASA by Richard C. Hoagland and Mike Bara works the same way. On the one hand, it presents evidence for all kinds of shenanigans and coverups and deliberate misinformation of the general public by the space agency and its collaborators… and on the other hand it seems to be overloaded with over-the-top conspiracy theories that leave the reader shaking her head in utter disbelief.

But the reader did read the whole book, because even with all that it’s utterly fascinating.

I don’t really see what the authors see in a lot of the photographs they use to show artificial structures on the moon and Mars. But that’s inherent in the translation of photograph to printed page–you don’t see everything that’s in the original picture by a long shot, and that’s true of all photos reproduced in mass market books. I don’t know what to think about the authors’ insistence that a lot of information has been withheld from the public and hypnotized into oblivion in the minds of the astronauts who were there and might have seen things that Someone doesn’t want the rest of us to know about. I don’t know whether the supposedly much-more-detailed photos of that “Face on Mars” were doctored to make people think that the original was some trick of light and shadow.

The authors talk about all that and much more in detail and they go into detail about how and why things were done. They have documents and witnesses and a very big axe to grind. Some of what they say sounds plausible. Some sounds crazy. So are these a couple of Captain Freedoms at work, or the guys who really know what’s really out there?

Read the book. Let me know what you think. I still haven’t made up my mind.

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