Hoagland fallout: email I've received
It's been about a month now since the Hoagland debunking pages went up. After the space.com article was syndicated to other venues, I got a flood of email, as expected. I want to give everyone here a synopsis of things.
When Hoagland was on C2C, George Noory commented that a lot of the mail he received was supportive of Hoagland. I expected that. Think about it. The audience for C2C is probably divided into two broad categories: those who believe what they hear, and those who listen for the sheer silliness of the guests. So if they have a guest whose claims are debunked as I did Hoagland's, the people who really believe will write letters, while those who would tend to agree with me wouldn't bother. So the email received by C2C is skewed in favor of Hoagland.
Interestingly, the opposite is what you'd expect for email sent to me. I've pointed this out before; if you present something to the public, you tend to get more negative than positive responses. People who like something won't usually write you and say they like it, but those who hate it are more inspired to write hate mail. So I would think that the email I get would be mostly negative.
It wasn't. I received roughly 150 emails about all this. That's not as many as I expected, but that's what I got. I divided them into three files: good, bad, and neutral. I was pretty harsh in my judgment, so that anything that was negative at all went to the "bad" pile. Neutrals are ones who didn't say whether or not they agree with me, but just had comments to make. It can be argued that anyone who disagrees with me would have said so, and so the neutrals should go in the "good" pile, but I want to be as fair as possible.
The tally is:
Good: 118
Neutral: 24
Bad: 22
So I received 5 times as many good as bad, the opposite of what you'd expect. This leads me to think that most people agreed with me. I'll note again that most people who agreed with me wouldn't bother writing, while those who didn't would. So the chances are the vast majority of those who read my pages, or the space.com article, agreed with me.
This also reinforces my decision not to debate Hoagland: why bother? Most people know he is full of it, and giving him a venue to increase his audience is not a goal of mine.
Unfortunately, I don't know for sure how many hits I got to the site because of this. When my site access log topped 2 Gb in size (!!) Apache freaked, and the log files got corrupted. I think that at the height, I got about 4 million hits in as many days (I was checking the log shortly before it crashed), so probably something like 8 million hits is a good guess over the whole period. Not bad.
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