23

• • • • • • •

In the Shadow of the Moon

As we have seen in previous chapters, NASA’s UFO position was simply adhering to the strategy adopted by the military, vis-à-vis the Roswell (1947) and Washington (1952) incidents, as well as the conclusions of various investigations (U.S. Air Force sponsored) that declared there were no UFOs or, more precisely, that there was no threat to U.S. national security interests.

Consider the options if they had not publicly denied what the astronauts had proclaimed, that they had observed UFOs; the astronauts would have directly contradicted the whole strategy and wrecked the credibility of the U.S. government.

NASA is, after all is said and done, a government agency with a very strong military component, orientation, and structure, especially back in the 1960s. The astronauts were the best-trained soldiers in the service, period.

They knew what they were observing, and their reports put NASA in the uncomfortable position of having to explain them away without undermining the reputations of their astronaut corps.

This all seems obvious and transparent, in retrospect, but at the time all these contradictory reports coming from astronauts, then being refuted by NASA, simply put the public in a state of confusion.

NASA has basically kept the public confused ever since.

First, they report signs of life on Mars. Next, they issue a slight disclaimer; perhaps those signs were prematurely identified, the public is told, and those indications are then questioned. Thereafter, a new mission is proposed using more sophisticated devices, which then determine that there really might be evidence of water on Mars, but then those results are questioned and a new mission is . . . we all know the cycle.

So why were the planned further missions that would conclude with the building of a lunar base terminated? As the record indicates, though there were some notable exceptions, the manned Apollo missions fulfilled their objectives. So the public was primed for the next phase, and the vision of men living and working on the moon had been implanted.

Oddly, in the middle of the cold war and right on the heels of the intense competition between the United States and the Soviet Union in the space race to get to the moon first, the two countries apparently made up and decided on a joint venture. This fact has not been given the close scrutiny it deserves.

Let us consider this very strange alliance between two avowed enemies who were on the brink of a nuclear exchange in 1962, just ten years earlier.

Literally, out of nowhere, on May 24, 1972, hawkish U. S. president Richard M. Nixon and equally hawkish Soviet Premier Alexi Kosygin announced they had signed an agreement for a joint manned space mission. This came out of the blue amidst the cold war’s arms race. They said they would put international manned spacecraft capable of docking with each other in orbit.

What? This was more unlikely than the air force suddenly admitting that Major Jesse Marcel had told the truth and that the Roswell debris was an alien artifact.

The mass media reported it as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Strange that this came immediately following the conclusion of the manned lunar missions that both countries had conducted. Curiously enough, both countries, which had their citizens believing that their astronauts and cosmonauts would soon be building a base on the moon, scrapped those plans without good explanations.

Not only did these cold war warriors suddenly embrace each other, quite unexpectedly, but they also went on to authorize the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, involving the rendezvous and docking in Earth orbit of a surplus Apollo command/service module with a Soyuz spacecraft.

The mission took place in July 1975. This was the last U.S. manned space flight until the first orbital flight of a space shuttle in April 1981.

To say that these were enigmatic twists that did not fit the geopolitical reality would be an incredible understatement. What in hell was actually behind all of that? The cold war was still in progress, deeply so, if we are to believe the media reports generated by both countries during that time.

In fact, the citizens of both nations were expecting the world to end in a nuclear war. How did it come to pass that both countries suddenly had concluded, behind the scenes, that it was advisable to cooperate where space ventures were concerned?

President Jimmy Carter would be elected in 1976. He was warmly embraced in UFO proponent circles because he claimed to have personally witnessed a UFO in flight. Carter assured the public that he would get to the truth of it and fully disclose whatever he found once in office. Four years went by, but that disclosure was never made.

What did Carter learn that made him renege on his campaign promise?

Then President Ronald Reagan got elected and started portraying the Soviet Union as being the “Evil Empire,” at the very same time the United States was involved in joint space missions with that big devil (strange to say the least). Why the duplicity on the part of both countries? The saber rattling was for public consumption, clearly.

It is obvious now that, behind the scenes, both countries had learned something from their lunar missions; whatever that was prompted the immediate cessation of lunar missions by both countries.

Instead of the proposed lunar bases that the United States and Soviet space programs were going to install, a wildly unexpected joint venture came flying, like a UFO, out of the blue. Note the date: May 1972. That year would end the manned lunar missions of both the United States and the Soviet Union. In their places, a new era of joint cooperation for the scientific study of space ensued.

These were fascinating and inexplicable geopolitical developments that were completely out of synch with the alleged cold war that the media were actively reporting on a daily basis.

(Side note: during the Apollo Program, NASA informed the U.S. astronauts that the Soviet spacecraft had missed [been diverted from?] from their lunar trajectory. How convenient.)

Did the mass media truly fail to notice how weird it was to be reporting on the cold war in one article and on the joint space ventures in an article alongside that one? The guys with the white hats suddenly joined hands with the guys in the black hats to go boldly where no man has gone before . . . and no one noticed that the whole thing did not jibe with the political reality, not at all?

Those born shortly before, during, or after these events cannot appreciate just how unlikely—at least as they were portrayed by the respective governments and media outlets—they actually were. If you were an adult then, you are probably a bit shocked and upset by looking back and considering how thoroughly we were manipulated.

Maybe the citizens of the Soviet Union were not really fooled. Soon thereafter, the Soviet Union would melt away like hot butter under a merciless New Mexico summer’s day.

The Apollo mission astronauts ran into things such as artificial structures, and their UFO sightings are a certainty, established by the transmissions between Houston and the astronauts. However, the general public accepted the NASA explanation. that the two-minute silence was caused by a camera malfunction.

(I suggest that you would not agree if you read the transmission and realized that the camera operations were as important as, if not more important than, the several experiments that were conducted on the lunar surface.)

During Apollo 11, Houston brought up the quality of the images, the resolution, the lighting, and other optical features as if they were in the process of filming a major Hollywood movie—even more consideration than a film crew gives to its work. To claim that one of its cameras failed, causing the live blackout that was witnessed live by a billion people, was dishonest at best.

Then using the same lame excuse during Apollo 12 went over the top and into never-never land. Could anyone really accept the premise that a highly trained astronaut could be incompetent enough and dumb enough to point the main camera at the sun? Absurd. Gone was that visual documentation (how convenient, indeed).

While the Soviet space program took the early lead and had great success, their manned lunar program entirely crashed and burned. This meant the Apollo Program proved that the United States had the superior technology and that America, did indeed, win the space race.

The Soviet leadership had made public pronouncements about landing a man on the moon and establishing a lunar presence as early as 1961; serious plans were not made until several years later. Sergey Korolyov, the senior Soviet rocket engineer, was apparently more interested in launching a heavy orbital station and in manned flights to Mars and Venus. With this in mind, Korolyov began the development of the superheavy N1 rocket, with a seventy-five-ton payload.

However, in August 1964, Vladimir Nikolayevich Chelomey, a Soviet missile and aircraft engineer and designer, was told to develop a moon-flyby program with a projected first flight by the end of 1966. He was further instructed to develop the moon-landing program with a first flight by the end of 1967. However, a number of unforeseen complications delayed the implementation of the program.

The Soviets did succeed in orbiting their Luna 9 spacecraft around the moon in 1966. At that point, it was thought that cosmonaut Alexey Leonov would be the first man who would walk on the moon. Research and development of various N1 rockets and spacecraft continued.

Four N1 test launches were attempted in 1969, 1971, and 1972, and all were failures, despite engineering improvements after each crash. The second launch attempt, on July 3, 1969, just thirteen days prior to the launch of Apollo 11, was a catastrophic failure that destroyed both the rocket and the launch complex, and this delayed the N1 program for two years more.

The Soviet Luna 20 mission landed an unmanned craft on the moon on February 21, 1972. Historians who try to explain away the sudden termination of both the United States’ and Soviet Union’s manned lunar missions brush it aside with the following interpretation: the Soviets were so discouraged by the United States triumphantly landing men on the moon first that they just gave up.

Wrong, as the evidence shows.

The Soviets were just as rational as their American counterparts, and they knew full well that the only way to prove the concept of a base on Mars was building one on the moon first. That, in fact, is still the only logical way to proceed, and NASA has revived the plan in recent years.

Curiously, ardent anti-Commie Richard Nixon slipped across the Pacific Ocean to pay a visit to China’s chairman Mao Tse-tung on February 28, 1972, a completely unexpected event that was without precedent. Then the manned Apollo 16 mission, bound for a lunar landing, was launched on April 16.

(Next, on July 25, U.S. Health Department officials made a shocking admission [which may seem totally off the subject at this juncture]; they admitted that African-Americans were used as guinea pigs in a report they handed over titled, “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male.” The release of this report clearly showed that the U. S. government can and has kept secrets and that it conducted experiments on its own citizens without their permission.)

Anyone who thinks that Roswell or lunar findings could not be suppressed is simply wrong and ignorant of these cases.

More of that kind of evidence would follow in the 1970s and 1980s. Yet the UFO and Roswell debunkers raved on and on (and still do) about the impossibility of the government keeping secrets from the prying media and inquisitive public . . . blah, blah, blah.

The unmanned Soviet Luna 20 mission and the manned Apollo 16 mission both showed that the Soviet Union and United States were actively engaged in examining the moon right up until 1972. (There was nothing in the mass media suggesting that the lunar program was about to be terminated prior to its cessation. However, its end was nearing.)

On December 7, 1972, the Apollo 17 spacecraft (with astronauts Eugene Cernan, Ronald Evans, and Harrison Schmitt) was launched; this was the last manned lunar mission to date. As noted above, the joint United States/Soviet space program was announced in May 1972, six months earlier. Detente was still a long way off, as was the cold war thaw. In fact, that would not really happen until twenty years after the Soyuz-Apollo deal was announced.

Next, both countries not only shifted their focus from the lunar base objective, they also shifted to space shuttle–type operations.

Not surprisingly, the program formally commenced in 1972; the space shuttle was originally sold to the public as a “space truck,” which would, among other things, be used to build a United States space station in low Earth orbit in the early 1990s, and then be replaced by a new vehicle.

Talk about a lowering of expectations. In one fell swoop, the “boldly go where . . .” proposition was turned into a meat-and-potatoes, low-orbit, truck-delivery operation.

NASA seemingly went through a transformation overnight. No more manned missions; they were replaced by robot probes, which still remain the strategy. The Star Trek vision came down to Earth, where it had always really been. The lunar base fantasy was not discussed much after that.

(Lest you think I am joking, the first shuttle orbiter was originally planned to be named the Constitution, but a massive write-in campaign from fans of the Star Trek television series convinced the White House to change the name to the Enterprise. The TV series had a lot to do with the space program.)

The space shuttles did not ignite the public imagination the way that the lunar program had. Then, two terrible tragedies—the in-flight destructions of the Challenger in 1986 and the Columbia in 2003—soon marred NASA’s reputation. I contend, ironically, that NASA backed itself into a corner by disavowing the UFO phenomenon. Public interest in space exploration would have remained high if NASA had been completely open and honest from the onset.

The shuttle program was decommissioned in 2011. Now what? According to NASA, it is déjà vu all over again. We shall go back to the moon, build a base, and then travel to Mars and start setting up a manned base, perhaps in 2020. Why? You (the U. S. government) have already told us in no uncertain terms that there are no extraterrestrials around, so if there are no other more advanced civilizations out there, why should we bother?

NASA astronomers and engineers pooh-pooh the idea of extraterrestrial visitation because of the vast distances that would have to be spanned, so why should we be confident they can solve that problem?

Killing the extraterrestrial idea has, in essence, killed public enthusiasm about the space program. The NASA budget has plummeted since the 1960s.

What could manned missions learn that computerized space probes have not already discovered? There are huge, perhaps insurmountable obstacles to long-term space flights or interplanetary bases.

First, they require perfection since both oxygen and water have to be continuously supplied and any life-support systems breach would be lethal. One accident and the mission is doomed. Have we been able to create a perfect, foolproof technology yet?

It seems time to call NASA’s bluff and to expose their public relations strategy. We are not going to have lunar or Mars bases any time in the near or intermediate future. The NASA budget has been cut in recent years, and putting together a manned spacecraft capable of sustaining a crew while they set up a base is nowhere near accomplished.

The ideas being offered by various scientists and engineers, who are eager for new contracts and grants, are silly at best. Some contend that we should get ready to leave Earth in case we ruin the planet and need to leave. Just how many spaceships would be readied to ferry how many of Earth’s seven billion inhabitants? Others claim that we should go on pursuing the exploration of the solar system for the sake of science.

Why, what have we learned so far that is of earthshaking importance? The moon is different from Earth; it is gray and full of meteor craters. It is also frigid; the solar nights are long, and lunar dust would make living on it and breathing a very costly proposition. So why should we bother going there—just to make work for overqualified, underemployed NASA engineers and administrators?

The global economy is not in any shape to support manned missions or lunar bases at any time in the near future. We are not going to be gaining any military advantage by further space exploration. NASA does not have the technology to land, set up, and establish a lunar or Martian mining base.

In fact, our public research dollars could be better spent on deeper investigations of Earth’s oceans rather than on continued investigations of the solar system. The recycling of the notion of establishing a lunar base at this time borders on senility. If NASA is not careful, this idea could backfire if not carried out by 2020. Not all of us out here have short memories. (As of this book’s release, that mission has been scrapped, though NASA has not come clean about the reasons.)

CONCLUSION

In fact, the record shows that NASA was planning to return to the moon after the successful Apollo missions. However, that plan was derailed by as yet unidentified factors. Now the notion is being recycled, but in doing so the agency is putting its reputation and neck on the line. If there is no follow-through, the space agency will continue to shrink and decline.