Richard C. Hoagland is a former museum space science Curator; a former NASA Consultant; and, during the historic Apollo Missions to the Moon, was science advisor to Walter Cronkite and CBS News. In the mid-1960's, at the age of 19 (possibly "the youngest museum curator in the country at the time"), Hoagland created his first elaborate commemorative event -- around NASA's first historic unmanned fly-by of the planet Mars, Mariner 4. A simultaneous all-night, transcontinental radio program the evening of the Encounter (linking the museum in Springfield, Mass., and NASA's JPL control center, in Pasadena, Ca.), co-produced by Hoagland and WTIC-Radio, in Hartford, Ct., was subsequently nominated for a Peabody Award, one of journalism's most prestigious.

In the early 1970's, Hoagland proposed to Carl Sagan (along with Eric Burgess) the placement of a "message to Mankind" aboard Pioneer 10 -- humanity's "first unmanned probe of Jupiter"; subsequent to its 1973 Jovian Encounter, celestial mechanics resulted in Pioneer 10 becoming the first artifact to successfully escape the solar system into the vast Galaxy beyond -- carrying "the Plaque" -- whose origins were officially acknowledged by Sagan in the prestigious journal, SCIENCE (175 [1972], 881).

In the early 1980's, based on NASA data from the more sophisticated unmanned Voyager fly-bys of the outer planets, Hoagland became the first to propose (in a widely-quoted series of UPI and AP stories on his startling paper, published in 1980 in Star & Sky magazine) the possible existence of "deep ocean life" under the global ice shield perpetually surrounding the enigmatic moon of Jupiter, Europa. At the time, most (though not all) NASA scientists instantly derided this idea; two outstanding dissenters from the unfortunately then-common NASA view were Director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, Dr. Robert Jastrow, and well-known science writer and visionary, Arthur C. Clarke. In the sequel to his outstanding epic "2001" ("2010: Odyssey Two"), built entirely around this extraordinary concept of "eon-old life in the ice-covered oceans of Europa," Clarke wrote:

"The fascinating idea that there might be life on Europa . . . was first proposed by Richard C. Hoagland [in a 30-page article] in the magazine Star & Sky... This quite brilliant concept has been taken seriously by a number of astronomers (notably NASA's Institute for Space Studies, Dr. Robert Jastrow), and may provide one of the best motives for the projected GALILEO Mission."

Mr. Hoagland can be contacted directly by fax or mail. He does not have a public e-mail address. The best way to get something to him is by fax. The faxes go directly to the fax machine in his office and he reads them daily. The address for direct mail is: