As I posted over at MSNBC BBS
http://bbs.msnbc.com/bbs/msnbc-space/posts/qb/119694.asp

in response to Robert Williams' rave reviews regarding Hoagland and Bara's newest "paper", which can be downloaded at http://www.enterprisemission.com/tide.htm

For what it's worth, the "scientific mainstream" will, in all likelihood, ignore this "paper" and "colaborative [sic] effort", and will rightly see
it as a supreme example of pseudoscience. The errors, not only in fact but reasoning, are numerous. For example, on page three, Hoagland and Bara assert that the southern highlands of Mars are "on average" 30
km higher than the northern plains. Actually, the full range of topography on Mars is 30 kilometers (from the floor of Hellas Basin, located in the southern highlands, to the top of Olympus Mons). In
fact, the northern hemisphere is on average FIVE kilometers lower than the southern hemisphere.

See
http://pao.gsfc.nasa.gov/gsfc/spacesci/pictures/mola/mars3d.htm

I guess this is not too bad, Hoagland and Bara are off only by a factor of 6. With basic errors like these it's hard to take this latest effort seriously. Actually, I feel as if I am watching Abbott and Costello (Hoagland and Bara), who do more and more damage to their
credibility by venturing into fields where they are clearly unqualified to render opinions. If this paper were handed to me in a double-blind peer review (i.e. both reviewers and authors are unknown to each other) I
would have tossed it into the rubbish can. Moreover, every one of the 29 images (except Figure 4) is attributable to someone else. I
wonder if these two are capable of "original" data production and analysis? Moreover, it's curious to see Hoagland (who excoriates NASA and JPL at every opportunity) blatantly and shamelessly rip off the Mars
Surveyor '98 logo by placing it on the TEM home page as an advertisement for this "new paper." Indeed, one will notice that he chopped off the text at the bottom of the logo, which reads "Unlocking Mars' History, Mars Surveyor '98".

Alex R. Blackwell
University of Hawaii