THE ULTIMATE CONSPIRACY THEORY.
Did man really walk on the Moon or was it the ultimate camera trick,
asks David Milne? The great lunar lie. In the early hours of May 16,
1990, after a week spent watching old video footage of man on the
Moon, a thought was turning into an obsession in the mind of Ralph
Rene.
"How can the flag be fluttering," the 47 year old American kept
asking himself, "when there's no wind on the atmosphere free Moon?"
That moment was to be the beginning of an incredible Space odyssey
for the self-taught engineer from New Jersey.
He started investigating the Apollo Moon landings, scouring every
NASA film, photo and report with a growing sense of wonder, until
finally reaching an awesome conclusion: America had never put a man on
the Moon.
The giant leap for mankind was fake. It is of course the conspiracy
theory to end all conspiracy theories. But Rene has now put all his
findings into a startling book entitled NASA Mooned America. Published
by himself, it's being sold by mail order - and is a compelling read.
The story lifts off in 1961 with Russia firing Yuri Gagarin into
space, leaving a panicked America trailing in the space race. At an
emergency meeting of Congress, President Kennedy proposed the ultimate
face saver, put a man on the Moon. With an impassioned speech he
secured the plan an unbelievable 40 billion dollars.
And so, says Rene (and a growing number of astro-physicists are
beginning to agree with him), the great Moon hoax was born.
Between 1969 and 1972, seven Apollo ships headed to the Moon. Six
claim to have made it, with the ill fated Apollo 13 - whose oxygen
tanks apparently exploded halfway - being the only casualties. But
with the exception of the known rocks, which could have been easily
mocked up in a lab, the photographs and film footage are the only
proof that the Eagle ever landed.
And Rene believes they're fake. For a start, he says, the TV footage
was hopeless.
The world tuned in to watch what looked like two blurred white ghosts
gambol through rocks and dust. Part of the reason for the low quality
was that, strangely, NASA provided no direct link up. So networks
actually had to film "man's greatest achievement" from a TV screen in
Houston -a deliberate ploy, says Rene, so that nobody could properly
examine it.
By contrast, the still photos were stunning. Yet that's just the
problem. The astronauts took thousands of pictures, each one perfectly
exposed and sharply focused. Not one was badly composed or even
blurred. As Rene points out, that's not all:
* The cameras had no white meters or view ponders. So the astronauts
achieved this feat without being able to see what they were doing.
* There film stock was unaffected by the intense peaks and powerful
cosmic radiation on the Moon, conditions that should have made it
useless.
* They managed to adjust their cameras, change film and swap filters
in pressurized clubs. It should have been almost impossible without
the use of their fingers.
Award winning British photographer David Persey is convinced the
pictures are fake. His astonishing findings are explained alongside
the pictures on these pages, but the basic points are as follows:
* The shadows could only have been created with multiple light
sources and, in particular, powerful spotlights. But the only light
source on the Moon was the sun.
* The American flag and the words "United States" are always brightly
lit, even when everything around is in shadow.
* Not one still picture matches the film footage, yet NASA claims
both were shot at the same time.
* The pictures are so perfect each one would have taken a slick
advertising agency hours to put them together. But the astronauts
managed it repeatedly.
David Persey believes the mistakes were deliberate, left there by
"whistle blowers", who were keen for the truth to one day get out. If
Persey is right and the pictures are fake, then we've only NASA's
word that man ever went to the Moon. And, asks Rene, why would anyone
fake pictures of an event that actually happened?
The questions don't stop there. Outer space is awash with deadly
radiation that emanates from solar flares firing out from the sun.
Standard astronauts orbiting Earth in near space, like those who
recently fixed the Hubble telescope, are protected by the Earth's Van
Allen belt. But the Moon is to 240,000 miles distant, wayoutside
this safe band. And, during the Apollo flights, astronomical data
shows there were no less than 1,485 such flares.
John Mauldin, a physicist who works for NASA, once said shielding at
least two meters thick would be needed. Yet the walls of the Lunar
Landers, which took astronauts from the spaceship to the moons surface
were, said NASA, "about the thickness of heavy duty aluminum foil".
How could that stop this deadly radiation?
And if the astronauts were protected by their space suits, why didn't
rescue workers use such protective gear at the Chernobyl
meltdown, which released only a fraction of the dose astronauts would
encounter?
Not one Apollo astronaut ever contracted cancer - not even the Apollo
16 crew who were on their way to the Moon when a big flare started.
"They should have been fried," says Rene.
Furthermore, every Apollo mission before number 11 (the first to the
Moon) was plagued with around 20,000 defects a-piece. Yet, with the
exception of Apollo 13, NASA claims there wasn't one major technical
problem on any of their Moon missions. Just one effect could have
blown the whole thing.
"The odds against these are so unlikely that God must have been the
co-pilot," says Rene.
Several years after NASA claimed its first Moon landing, Buzz Aldrin
"the second man on the Moon" - was asked at a banquet what it felt
like to step on to the lunarsurface. Aldrin staggered to his feet and
left the room crying uncontrollably. It would not be the last time he
did this."It strikes me he's suffering from trying to live out a very
big lie," says Rene.
Aldrin may also fear for his life. Virgil Grissom, a NASA astronaut
who baited the Apollo program, was due to pilot Apollo 1 as part of
the landings build up. In January 1967, he hung a lemon on his Apollo
capsule (in the US, unroadworthy cars are called lemons) and told his
wife
Betty: "if there is ever a serious accident in the space program,
it's likely to be me."
Nobody knows what fuelled his fears, but by the end of the month
he and his two co-pilots were dead, burnt to death during a test run
when their capsule, pumped full of highpressure pure oxygen,
exploded.
Scientists couldn't believe NASA's carelessness - even chemistry
students in high school know high pressure oxygen is extremely
explosive. In fact, before the first manned Apollo fight even cleared
the launch pad, a total of 11 would-be astronauts were dead. Apart
from the three who were incinerated, seven died in plane crashes and
one in a car smash.
Now this is a spectacular accident rate. "One wonders if these
'accidents' weren't NASA's way of correcting mistakes," says Rene. "Of
saying that some of these men didn't have the sort of 'right stuff'
they were looking for."
NASA won't respond to any of these claims, their press office will
only say that the Moon landings happened and the pictures are real.
But a NASA public affairs officer called Julian Scheer once delighted
200 guests at a private party with footage of astronauts apparently on
a landscape. It had been made on a mission film set and was identical
to what NASA claimed was they real lunar landscape.
"The purpose of this film," Scheer told the enthralled group, "is to
indicate that you really can fake things on the ground, almost to the
point of deception." He then invited his audience to "come to your
own decision about whether or not man actually did walk on the Moon".
A sudden attack of honesty? You bet, says Rene, who claims the only
real thing about the Apollo missions were the lift offs. The
astronauts simply have to be on board, he says, in case the rocket
exploded. "It was the easiest way to ensure NASA wasn't left with
three astronauts who ought to be dead," he claims, adding that they
came down a day or so later, out of the public eye (global
surveillance wasn't what it is now) and into the safe hands of NASA
officials, who whisked them off to prepare for the big day a week
later.
And now NASA is planning another giant step - project Outreach, a 1
trillion dollar manned mission to Mars. "Think what they'll be able to
mock up with today's computer graphics," says Rene chillingly.
"Special effects was in its infancy in the 60s. This time round we
will have no way of determining the truth."
Space oddities:
* Apollo 14 astronaut Allen Shepard played golf on the Moon. In
front of a worldwide TV audience, Mission Control teased him about
slicing the ball to the right. Yet a slice is caused by uneven air
flow over the ball. The Moon has no atmosphere and no air.
* A camera panned upwards to catch Apollo 16's Lunar Lander lifting
off the Moon. Who did the filming?
* One NASA picture from Apollo 11 is looking up at Neil Armstrong
about to take his giant step for mankind. The photographer must have
been lying on the planet surface. If Armstrong was the first man on
the Moon, then who took the shot?
* The pressure inside a space suit was greater than inside a
football. The astronauts should have been puffed out like the
Michelin Man, but were seen freely bending their joints.
* The Moon landings took place during the Cold War. Why didn't
America make a signal on the moon that could be seen from earth? The
PR would have been phenomenal and it could have been easily done with
magnesium flares.
* Text from pictures in the article. Only two men walked on the Moon
during the Apollo 12 mission. Yet the astronaut reflected in the visor
has no camera. Who took the shot?
* The flags shadow goes behind the rock so doesn't match the dark
line in the foreground, which looks like a line cord. So the shadow to
the lower right of the spaceman must be the flag. Where is his shadow?
And why is the flag fluttering?
Index