PART 2: >
In our model, it was this successful completion of Apollo’s secret mission and agenda, and not Congressional budget cuts, which was the real reason for this abrupt cessation of America’s historic journeys to the Moon, and the primary reason no one has gone near the lunar surface for over 30 years.
All of which makes the sudden announcement by President George W. Bush of a new White House/NASA program “to return to the Moon by 2020,” made at NASA Headquarters on January 14, 2004, so incredibly intriguing.
What does the current Bush Administration know, 30 years after the termination of Apollo, regarding what is waiting on the Moon for human beings to return?
And is this why this Administration has mounted an Apollo-style program “on steroids” - as new NASA Administrator Mike Griffin, specifically appointed by President Bush to head the new lunar return program, wryly terms it?
Is NASA’s sudden interest in returning to the Moon actually an effort to get back as quickly as its current budgets will allow, before a host of other countries do the same?
Countries that have, independently, suddenly announced their plans for going to the Moon - countries like China, India, Japan and Russia, and even the European Space Agency?
Are we seeing a second space race being born?
A race not for mere propaganda victories this time, but a much more important race, among a much wider field of players, for sole access to the scientific secrets the set of surviving lunar structures surveyed by Apollo must inevitably contain - which, to those who successfully decode what they discover this time could mean the ultimate domination of the Earth?
It was just a few years after the start of the Apollo missions that even more extraordinary solar system ruins were first observed on Mars - beginning with images and other instrumented scans sent back by NASA’s first Mars orbiter, the unmanned Mariner 9 spacecraft, in late 1971.
This earliest robotic confirmation that there is also something “anomalous” on Mars paved the way for far more extensive observations when the first Viking orbiters and landers arrived half a decade later.
Again, the details of these critical observations and discoveries - and their documentation - will be laid out later in this volume.
The critical thing here is that, in direct contradiction to everything the press and the American people were being led to believe that NASA stood for - program transparency, open scientific inquiry, freedom of publication - the Agency quietly and methodically covered-up up the most astonishing wonders it had found.
Many of NASA’s consulting sociologists and anthropologists to Brookings (like Dr. Margaret Meade, whom I had the privilege of actually working with in later years, at New York’s Hayden Planetarium) had been warning NASA, even as Brookings was being researched and assembled, of “the enormous potential for social instability” if the existence of bona fide extraterrestrials - or even their ruins - was officially revealed in the socially repressive and heavily religious environment of the late 1950s.
With those first Lunar Orbiter images taken of the Moon, everything - the reality of ruins, their extraordinary scale, their obvious presence on more than one world in the solar system, how their builders vanished - suddenly was all too real.
There had been a powerful, enormously encompassing, extraordinary solar-system-wide civilization that had simply disappeared, only to be rediscovered by NASA’s primitive initial probes.
A civilization that, it would turn out later, had been wiped out through a series of all-encompassing, solar system-wide cataclysms.
The most disturbing part of “Brookings” to policy makers, however - even before these shattering discoveries were verified - was its thinly-veiled, authoritative warnings regarding what could happen to our civilization if NASA’s 1950s-style “ET predictions” were confirmed.
“Anthropological files contain many examples of societies, sure of their place in the universe, which have disintegrated when they had to associate with previously unfamiliar societies espousing different ideas and different life ways; others that survived such an experience usually did so by paying the price of changes in values and attitudes and behavior…”
The literal disintegration of society - simply from knowing that “we’re not alone.”
The Brookings discussion of the implications of such a crucial discovery also encompassed a critical second-level problem:
What to do if the Agency, at some point in the future, actually made such a momentous, world-changing confirmation of extraterrestrial intelligence next door?
Or even of their surviving ruins and artifacts?
NASA’s discussion of these problems before they occurred - and the draconian measures it was seriously considering - is critically revealing:
“Studies might help to provide programs for meeting and adjusting to the implications of such a discovery. Questions one might wish to answer by such studies would include:
How might such information, under what circumstances, be presented to or withheld from the public, for what ends?
What might be the role of the discovering scientists and other decision makers regarding release of the fact of discovery?”
Following the political tumult and excitement of the first successful Apollo Lunar Landings, the White House and NASA dramatically changed the direction of the entire space program - under the excuse of a lack of public interest and insufficient funding.
The Agency quickly dropped any pretense of following up on the Apollo Program with permanent bases on the Moon, as well as indefinitely postponing all discussion and plans for going on to Mars.
Instead, under the now-proven lie of developing an economical, reliable, reusable space transportation system, and a “world-class” space research laboratory for it to re-supply - i.e., the Shuttle, and the International Space Station - NASA collaborated with the White House in a fateful set of decisions in the early 1970s that would consign American astronauts to endlessly circle the Earth for decades, while the Moon - with stunning ruins and bits and pieces of a miraculous, preserved technology orbiting just a quarter of a million miles away - was totally ignored.
On February 15, 2001, Fox Television aired a widely-advertised show titled Conspiracy Theory - Did We Land on the Moon?
With this program, Fox removed the last weak link in NASA’s ongoing, 40-year-old chain of overlapping cover-ups. It is our assertion that not only was this “Moon hoax” tale carefully constructed as an elegant piece of professional disinformation - as a desperately required distraction from the real lunar conspiracy documented here, which was beginning to seriously unravel as early as 1996.
For, I can personally testify that I was a first-hand witness to “the Moon hoax” true beginnings far, far earlier than the 2001 Fox Special - back in 1969, and in the heart of NASA itself!
The occasion was the unforgettable Apollo summer of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin’s epic journey to the Moon - the amazing July landing of Apollo 11. I, of course, had been deeply immersed in all aspects of our CBS coverage of the upcoming Apollo 11 mission for months as official science advisor to CBS News Special Events and chief correspondent Walter Cronkite.
For the actual flight of Apollo 11, I was assigned (at my own request) to the Downey, California facility of the prime contractor for the Apollo Command and Service Modules, North American Rockwell. I was there to personally oversee construction and special effects use of my pet project for our nonstop CBS coverage of “Lunar Landing Day” - a “walk-through solar system” constructed by North American technicians specifically for myself and CBS in a huge, drafty aircraft hanger.
It was in this miniature, recreated version of the solar system that I had successfully proposed that Walter Cronkite interview via satellite key engineers, project managers and “special guests” - those who had built the Apollo spacecraft at North American or had special knowledge in the realm of history and space - to comment on the historic legacy of the Apollo 11 flight.
One luminary I was proud to bring before the cameras, to chat with Walter in New York regarding the extraordinary nature of events occurring that historic night, was Robert A. Heinlein, the dean of American science fiction.
Decades earlier, Bob had co-written the screenplay for Destination Moon, one of the first technically accurate film depictions of the lunar journey then unfolding on live television before a billion people all over planet Earth.
As the successful author of a pioneering series of “juvenile” SF novels that, for the first time, introduced realistic space travel and engineering concepts to an entire generation of future NASA scientists and engineers, Robert Heinlein had, almost single handedly, “inspired the workforce” for the entire space program.
CONTINUED : >
(post is archived)