by Mike Bara
On the night of November 1–2, 1963, a few days after Greenacre’s event, at the Observatoire du Pic-du-Midi in the French Pyrenees, Zdenek Kopal and Thomas Rackham made the first photographs of a “wide area lunar luminescence.” His article in Scientific American transformed it into one of the most widely publicized TLP events. Kopal, like others, had argued that Solar Energetic Particles could be the cause of such a phenomenon.
During the Apollo 11 mission Houston radioed to Apollo 11: “We’ve got an observation you can make if you have some time up there. There’s been some lunar transient events reported in the vicinity of Aristarchus.” Astronomers in Bochum, West Germany, had observed a bright glow on the lunar surface—the same sort of eerie luminescence that has intrigued moon watchers for centuries. The report was passed on to Houston and thence to the astronauts. Almost immediately, Armstrong reported back, “Hey, Houston, I’m looking north up toward Aristarchus now, and there’s an area that is considerably more illuminated than the surrounding area. It seems to have a slight amount of fluorescence.”
In 1992, Audouin Dollfus of the Observatoire de Paris reported anomalous features on the floor of Langrenus crater using a one-meter (3.2-foot) telescope. While observations on the night of December 29,1992, were normal, unusually high albedo and polarization features were recorded the following night that did not change in appearance over the six minutes of data collection. Observations three days later showed a similar, but smaller, anomaly in the same vicinity. While the viewing conditions for this region were close to specular, it was argued that the amplitude of the observations were not consistent with a specular reflection of sunlight. The favored hypothesis was that this was the consequence of light scattering from clouds of airborne particles resulting from a release of gas. The fractured floor of this crater was cited as a possible source of the gas.
While the most common explanation for these transient events is some sort of volcanic “out–gassing,” it must be noted that this conflicts with the idea that Moon is geologically inactive. Without tectonic plate movement or an active, rotating core, the Moon could not possibly be geologically active, meaning that these mysterious coloration changes and clouds could not possibly be caused by erupting gasses. Any volatiles would have long since escaped over the Moon’s 4.5 billion year life cycle. So if that isn’t the explanation, then what is? A good question. Which we are about to answer…
Footnotes:
1 The Reluctant Hypothesis: A History of Discourse Surrounding the Lunar Phase Method of Regulating Conception. Lacuna Press, p. 239. ISBN 978-0951097427.
2 Barnhart, Robert K. (1995). The Barnhart Concise Dictionary of Etymology. USA: Harper Collins, p. 487. ISBN 0-06-270084-7.Allen, Kevin (2007).
3 Asimov, Isaac (1975). “Just Mooning Around”, collected in Of Time and Space, and Other Things. Avon. Formula derived on p. 89 of book. p. 55 of .pdf file. Retrieved 07-24-2012.
4 Aslaksen, Helmer (2010). “The Orbit of the Moon around the Sun is Convex!”. National University of Singapore: Department of Mathematics. Retrieved 07-24-2012.
4 http: //www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/tothemoon/origins.html
5 Barbara Middlehurst, Jaylee Burley, Patrick Moore, and Barbara Weither (1968). “Chronological Catalog of Reported Lunar Events,” NASA TR R-277
CHAPTER 2
THE 20TH CENTURY
I’m sure you’re aware of the extremely grave potential for
cultural shock and social disorientation contained in the present
situation, if the facts were prematurely and suddenly made public
without adequate preparation and conditioning. Anyway, this is the
view of the Council… there must be adequate time for a full study
to be made of the situation before any thought can be given to
making a public announcement.
–Dr. Heywood Floyd, 2001: A Space Odyssey
The modern era of lunar exploration actually began in the late 1950’s with the formation of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in the United States and advent of the modern “space race” with the Soviet Union. At the outset, no one really knew where the space race was headed, or even where the finish line was. All that either side knew was that space was next great frontier to be conquered.
With the development of early rockets like the German V-2 and the U.S. Redstone, it became possible to consider launching artificial satellites into Earth orbit. Thanks to many technological innovations of the period, both solid and liquid fuel rockets were under development in the West by various rocket teams. It seemed only a matter of time until the United States placed a satellite (or a man) into Earth orbit.
No one knew the full extent of the secretive Russian rocketry progress until October 4th, 1957, when the Soviet Union stunned the world by successfully launching the world’s first artificial satellite, Sputnik 1, into orbit. This achievement electrified the American public, which had assumed they were well ahead in the newly declared “space race.”
Because of the possible threat of the communists raining nuclear bombs from space with no warning, the United States responded by hurriedly trying to launch a response mission, Vanguard 1. It blew up on the launching pad. Desperate, the U.S. turned to Dr. Werner von Braun and his handpicked team of Nazi rocket scientists to find a way to match the Soviets. Von Braun was considered a last resort because of his Nazi past, but he was a genius in rocketry, and he saved the day by successfully putting Explorer I, a 30-pound payload, into orbit.
But the euphoria of that achievement didn’t last long. The Soviets launched one successful mission after another and were clearly well ahead of the U.S. in their ability to place payloads into Earth orbit. And soon they had their eyes on another prize; being first to the Moon.
The Brookings Report
In order to counter this, the United States decided that it needed a centralized space planning agency that would oversee the civilian U.S. Space efforts. NASA, as we know it today, actually evolved from several earlier organizations. One called the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, or NACA, was the primary source of early NASA brainpower. The NACA director, Dr. Vannevar Bush, was an instrumental player in many early aerospace projects and companies. He was co-founder of Raytheon systems, still a major defense contractor, and was director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, which oversaw the Manhattan Project which developed the U.S. atomic bomb. He was also President Roosevelt’s scientific advisor and played a key role in bringing many of the Nazi rocket scientists, like Werner Von Braun, to the USA.
But from the beginning, NASA was born under a cloak of secrecy that seemed aimed at one specific secret agenda; hiding the evidence of an Ancient Alien presence in the solar system.
Publically, the National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958 states that NASA is “a civilian agency exercising control over aeronautical and space activities sponsored by the United States.” But in reality, the Space Act shows that NASA is a sub-division of the Department of Defense and is subject to DOD oversight of all its activities:
“Sec. 305… (i) The [National Aeronautics and Space] Administration shall be considered a defense agency of the United States for the purpose of Chapter 17, Title 35 of the United States Code…”
The Act also makes it clear that NASA is not free to disclose anything that the President or the DOD might consider to be “classified information.”
“Sec. 205… (d) No [NASA] information which has been classified for reasons of national security shall be included in any report made under this section [of the act]…”
The intent of these sections is to make it clear that NASA is not an independent, civilian space research agency, but rather an adjunct of the DOD that is totally under that department’s control. The reasons for this are not immediately clear until you study another document also commissioned at the dawn of the space age; the so-called “Brookings Report.”
After NASA was formed and almost before the ink was
dry on the bill that brought it into being, NASA commissioned a formal study into the projected effects on American society of its many planned activities. This report was first published to some fanfare in early 1960’s, but then lay dormant for many years afterwards until it was rediscovered in the mid-1990s.
At that time, Professor Stanley V. McDaniel was seeking additional documentation for his then-ongoing study into NASA’s new imaging and data policy surrounding the controversial Mars Observer program. In the final stages of his study, McDaniel asked Richard C. Hoagland (my co-author on Dark Mission) for some assistance in locating some NASA documents and research papers relating to its SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) project. Hoagland told McDaniel of the long-rumored existence of an official NASA report supposedly commissioned by the space agency in its early years that related to possible NASA censorship of SETI evidence if it was ever discovered. At McDaniel’s urging, Hoagland began actively searching for the document, polling various contacts and eventually having a conversation with former police detective Don Ecker. Ecker, a consultant to UFO magazine, called in a couple of favors and not only confirmed the existence of this highly controversial study—but came up with the actual title: Proposed Studies on the Implications of Peaceful Space Activities for Human Affairs.
After some more digging, Hoagland eventually came up with the document, authored by The Brookings Institution. The Brookings Institution was probably the world’s foremost “think-tank” of its day, and the contributors to the NASA study were a veritable “who’s-who” of the leading academics of the time. MIT’s Curtis H. Barker, NASA’s own Jack C. Oppenheimer, and famed anthropologist Margaret Mead were all consulted for contributions to the final Report.
After scouring the document, it quickly becomes apparent that the underlying purpose of the Brookings Report was to provide legal and political cover for NASA in the event it ever kept secret discoveries that the president or the DOD declared “classified.” The most stunning remarks came on page 215, where the Report mentions the possibility that “artifacts” (i.e. extraterrestrial Ancient Alien ruins) may be found by NASA in their explorations of the solar system:
“While face-to-face meetings with it [extraterrestrial intelligence] will not occur within the next twenty years (unless its technology is more advanced than ours, qualifying it to visit Earth), artifacts left at some point in time by these life forms might possibly be discovered through our space activities on the Moon, Mars or Venus” the Report states. “Artifacts” of course, mean ruins. Ancient Alien ruins. It is obvious from this statement that NASA not only suspected they might encounter ancient alien ruins, they expected to find them.
It then goes on to consider whether such a discovery should, rather than be made public immediately, be suppressed:
“How might such information, under what circumstances, be presented or withheld from the public, [and] for what ends?”
This single line alone in the 250 page Report provides NASA with the crucial political cover it needed to justify hiding any discoveries of Ancient Alien ruins anywhere in the solar system. It justifies the possible cover-up by considering the possibility of social devastation if such a discovery were made public without an adequate preparation period for social adjustment:
“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 Report then goes on to reinforce the point with more examples:
“…the fundamentalist (and anti-science) sects are growing apace around the world… For them, the discovery of other life — rather than any other space product—would be electrifying… If super-intelligence is discovered, the [social] results become quite unpredictable…”
Obviously, this section is particularly relevant even today, with the rise of Islamic fundamentalism all over the world. But the Report also cautions that the more advanced and scientifically educated nations and individuals, such as those in the United States, might also suffer similar emotional and social upheaval:
“… of all groups, scientists and engineers might be the most devastated by the discovery of relatively superior creatures, since these professions are most clearly associated with mastery of nature.” (p. 225)
It then suggested, obviously, that further studies were needed. It then goes on to make the following (and somewhat alarming) statement about the entire question of whether to announce or withhold the discovery of Ancient Alien ruins:
“… the consequences of such a discovery are presently unpredictable…”
The Report then references an obscure work by psychologist Hadley Cantrell, titled The Invasion From Mars: A Study in the Psychology of Panic (Princeton University Press, 1940). This little known book was commissioned by the Rockefeller Foundation under a grant to Princeton University. Its subject was the 1938 Orson Welles War of the Worlds radio broadcast and the effect it had on portions of the American listening public. It is estimated that more than a million people in the northeast United States panicked over the broadcast, hearing Wells’ brilliant production and believing the Martian invasion was real. The implication of the book and its inclusion in the Brookings Report is that the broadcast was a psychological warfare experiment, and that America dramatically failed the test. Given this, it seems reasonable that NASA might have adopted an official policy of cover-up of the discovery of any Ancient Alien artifacts it might discover.
It isn’t difficult to sum up the Brookings Report. Among its wide-ranging analysis and conclusions are the following:
“Artifacts” (i.e. Ancient Alien ruins) are likely to be found by NASA on the Moon andor Mars.
If the artifacts point to the existence of a superior civilization, the social impact is “unpredictable.”
Various negative social consequences, from “devastation” of the scientists and engineers, to an “electrifying” rise in religious fundamentalism, to the complete “disintegration” of society are distinct possibilities. The War of the Worlds broadcast provides an excellent example.
Serious consideration should be given to “withholding” such information from the public if, in fact, artifacts are ever discovered.
So here we have the proverbial smoking gun. Not only was NASA advised almost from its inception to withhold any data that supported the reality of the Ancient Alien theory or any other discovery like it, they were told to do so for the good of human society as a whole. Most especially, they should withhold the data from their own rank and file engineers and scientists, since they were the most vulnerable members of all of human society. It doesn’t take a proverbial rocket scientist to conclude that NASA took these recommendations and transformed them into policy at the highest levels. Nor would it be surprising if the whole question of “artifacts” were considered a national security issue – given (again) NASA’s founding charter position as “a defense agency of the United States.”
Although the document itself is fairly obscure today, this was not so in the early 1960’s. The New York Times published a brief summary of the Brookings Report in December, 1960. It was apparent from the Times’ treatment of the Report that the potential for a social meltdown if such explosive information ever became public was considered a prime threat to the existing social order. “MANKIND IS WARNED TO PREPARE FOR DISCOVERY OF LIFE IN SPACE: Brookings Institution Report Says Earth’s Civilization Might Topple if Faced by a Race of Superior Beings,” the December 15th, 1960 headline screamed breathlessly.
As part of our research for Dark Mission, Richard C. Hoagland also discovered that The Brookings Report was the basis for Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick’s seminal film 2001: A Space Odyssey. In fact, according to a 1968 Playboy interview, Kubrick could quote from the Brookings Report chapter and verse. In
the interview, he quoted the exact passages shown above, and declared that the whole question of covering up the discovery of artifacts to be the central theme of his legendary film.
From early on, Brookings officially affirmed NASA’s expectation that the agency would inevitably fly to nearby planets in the solar system, and would thus be physically capable, for the first time, of confronting “extraterrestrials” right in their own backyard. Obviously, this goes a long way to explaining the sometimes irrational “skepticism” that most mainstream NASA- funded scientists have regarding the whole ET question. It also might go a long way to explaining some of NASA’s later behavior as their exploration of the solar system actually began.
Early Unmanned Probes
Armed with this new legal and political cover, both NASA and the Soviet space programs were free to begin going to the Moon and beyond. The Russian were the first to try.
The Soviet Luna program began in 1957 and its objective from the beginning was to successfully send an unmanned probe to the Moon and crash it there. While this may seem like a goal of questionable value today, at the time it would have been a major achievement on the scale of Sputnik itself. But when the idea was first conceived, no one knew for certain just how difficult it would turn out to be to actually navigate to the Moon, much less to the Moon and back as would be necessary for a manned mission to our nearest neighbor.
As I extensively documented in The Choice, and as Richard C. Hoagland and I covered in the extended edition of Dark Mission, it turned out that simply launching a probe into Earth orbit and then aiming it at and actually hitting the Moon was quite a challenge. Flatly, it should not have been. The mathematics involved and the calculations for gravity were well known, even in the late 1950’s. All that should have been required was to get a probe up into space and then fire the rocket to the point the Moon would be in a few days. The Moon, after all, has a diameter of more than 2,160 miles. That’s a pretty big target. But neither the Russians nor the Americans could seem to figure out this seemingly straightforward task.