In late 1997, I invited Richard C. Hoagland to present his research to the residents of the state of Utah. On May 16th, 1998,  Mr. Hoagland delivered a 5 hour lecture at the Fine Arts Auditorium on the campus at the University of Utah and his presentation was only a few weeks after the Mars Global Surveyor took new pictures of the Cydonia region of Mars since the 1976 Viking missions. Hoagland’s lecture was also only a week after Dr. Michael Malin lectured at the same auditorium. (Dr. Malin was the lead scientist for the Mars Orbiter Camera on the Mars Global Surveyor.)

The two-part video provided here (part 1 here) was recorded on an old handheld camcorder by an audience member and we only have segments of the 5 hour presentation. There was a more professional recording made of this lecture but it has not yet surfaced. (If you know who has any information on the more complete version we would hope you could help make it available.)

In part 2, Mr. Hoagland fields questions from the audience:

The lecture in May of 1998 is significant as it was after Mr. Hoagland’s first few weeks of being able to analyze the new Cydonia imagery. We had waited and wondered if NASA would ever actually get imagery of the place since the weird loss of Mars Observer only five years earlier. NASA did not simply take these images. They were, in the words of Hoagland, “dragged kicking and screaming” all the while to even ultimately take them. But take them they did. ¹⁾We will examine additional discoveries since these images were taken in future articles.

The event could not have happened without the assistance of the University’s Student Union. The lecture was also attended by the local press, and the Deseret News published a short article about the lecture.

Clyde Lewis, host of the radio show Ground Zero, was also invited by Jason Cook to introduce Mr. Hoagland to the audience.

For additional background see here.

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