Those parts I highlighted pretty much sums up how pseudo-science works. As mentioned before from RationalWiki (which also has more details about that Hoagland version):
Torsion field - RationalWiki
Their nonsense is loosely based on existing scientific ideas and concepts, and those woo-salesmen are counting on the fact their audiences don't have enough time or knowledge to evaluate where facts turn into fiction. Similarly all sorts of belief systems and religions are always built on top of some earlier iterations, as there has to be something familiar that people already accept, and then they can sneak in some new nonsense on top of it. In reality it's the details that make or break theories, but people have a tendency to take some familiar parts as confirmation of larger wholes, even though it doesn't logically work like that.
Ultimately it's about psychology and how our minds have certain tendencies for irrational thinking. One of the reasons why the scientific method works so well is because it tries to minimize their effects.
If we consider those pseudo-scientific claims of that (non-scientist) Hoagland for instance, it seems to be a typical case of wishful thinking leading to selection and confirmation biases, basically seeing a signal where there's none, and ignoring all evidence to the contrary. Our minds also tend to work so that the more we invest into something like that, the more we believe against all logic and evidence, as it just becomes more and more painful to admit the mistake and all that was wasted.
Eventually it can get to the levels of True-believer syndrome - Wikipedia , which in all its strangeness is illustrated nicely by these examples:
So it's no wonder True believers keep on believing illusionists and pseudo-scientists even when others thoroughly expose them, if they can keep believing them even after they expose themselves! When such downward spirals of negative evidence reinforcing beliefs continue long enough, the results are not pretty, to say the least. I have seen how it progresses over relatively short time periods, and when someone reaches the point that they basically create themselves a bubble universe of their own and ignore the real one, there's not much you can do anymore. It's like talking to a zombie.
Matthew J. Sharps has given a good explanation of the psychological factors at play, on that same page (and explained in more detail in that referenced article):
Those are pretty easy to connect to the conversation about torsion fields pseudo-science before, just by reading various messages by the believers, which pretty much confirm those factors at work. Those somewhat distant and suitably vague Russian "theories" provide the right kind of mixture of something familiar mixed with improbable, incredible and nonsensical. That's along the lines of all sorts of secret and sacred information in various belief systems. As you can read before, those who believe in those have themselves asserted how they lack the expertise of proper evaluation but have nonetheless invested considerable time on the ideas over the years, see more value in taking improbable things seriously than most of us, like those ideas and overall concepts because they are relevant for their hopes and current interests etc., and are also willing to accept more and more ideas of questionable nature that seem to come along those already accepted ones.
It's also easy to see how the various psychological defense mechanisms start to kick in and how the inability to actually respond to the given disconcerting information leads to blaming the messenger, inventing conspiracy theories etc. It's all very familiar and follows the same patterns that can be seen in pretty much all similar kinds of conversations about religious and pseudo-scientific ideas. I have seen enough of those that I could probably have written a reasonably accurate script of how the conversation will proceed before it happened. But then the pseudo-science types would have taken it as evidence of clairvoyance or time-travel...
