I knew Dr Tom Van Flandern. I even wrote to him a couple of times. I subscribed to his Meta Research monthly report for years. I really don't know why he supported Richard Hoagland's Mars face junk. Maybe it was a "political need" in order to get money and subscribers?

Here's a quick summary of him:

He was an American astronomer who worked for the US Naval Observatory for many years, and he later became known as a maverick scientist who challenged mainstream cosmology. He ran his own publication called the Meta Research Bulletin, which was his newsletter where he promoted alternative ideas in physics and astronomy.

He was indeed a supporter of the Face on Mars and the Cydonia region anomalies, taking them more seriously than mainstream science did.

His book was called "Dark Matter, Missing Planets and New Comets" published in 1993, which matches your memory of "dark matter" being in the title. In it he challenged conventional ideas about gravity, proposed alternatives to the Big Bang, and covered a range of heterodox astronomical theories.

He had genuine credentials which made him an interesting figure — he wasn't a crank with no background, he was a professional astronomer with real expertise who simply departed significantly from consensus views later in his career.


Here's a summary of his position regarding Einstein and Relativity:

Van Flandern was quite critical of Einstein's relativity, both Special and General. He was one of the more credentialed scientists to openly challenge it, which gave his criticisms more weight than the typical relativity skeptic.

His main positions:
He argued that the speed of gravity was not the speed of light as General Relativity requires, but was effectively instantaneous or many orders of magnitude faster than light. He pointed to the fact that gravity seems to point to the instantaneous position of a body rather than its retarded position (where it was when the light left it), which he felt was a serious unresolved problem for relativity.

He was critical of what he saw as the scientific community's unwillingness to seriously examine anomalies and inconsistencies in relativistic predictions, feeling that confirmations of relativity were sometimes overstated and contradicting evidence dismissed too quickly.

He favored a return to more Newtonian-style thinking combined with a push-gravity or "Le Sage" style model, where gravity is explained by a flux of particles rather than spacetime curvature.

His broader point
He felt that Einstein's framework had become almost untouchable in mainstream science — that it had taken on a quasi-religious status where contradicting evidence wasn't being fairly evaluated. This was consistent with his general view that consensus science had become too rigid and self-protective.

Most mainstream physicists rejected his arguments, but he made them coherently and with genuine technical knowledge rather than simply misunderstanding the theory.

I recall that he used examples from astronomy, where he deduced that the speed of gravity must be thousands, or tens of thousands of times faster than the speed of light. Perhaps, even faster than that. I've never heard anyone speak about the speed of gravity.

I stand to be corrected, but I'm sure I've heard on American shows, where scientists say that GRAVITY WAVES move at the speed of light! To me that sounded like rubbish. In fact, I am skeptical about the concept of them measuring "Gravity Waves". I could be wrong. But to me it sounds like rubbish.

I know some scientists speak of the fact that we need a Quantum Theory of Gravity. But it is as if, the way gravity behaves out in deep space is also different to what we measure here. Anyhow, the crux of it is that to me, there needs to be a mechanical explanation of gravity in the same way that we speak of light as a photon. All this time-space curvature sounds like a bunch of nonsense to me. Gravity must have a speed in the same way that sound and light have a speed. It must have a mechanism.

Van Flandern also believed in a type of "push". In his book he had diagrams of how you could get the gravitational effect and why it would work the way it does and why it would become weaker by the square of the distance. This sounded much more sensible to me. It sounds more Newtonian. It sounds more realistic to me. Einstein's stuff has always seemed to me to be weird.