by Mike Bara
“Well, on that particular case—this was Apollo 14—after we had received the film, right after the astronauts had returned to the Earth, it had been processed in the NASA photo lab. It was my responsibility to put together a private viewing for the chief astronomer—that was Dr. Thornton Page and his associates and contributing scientists. I took the film over and set it up into what is called a ‘sequence [projector]’; it’s kind of like one of the gun cameras they use in the military [but in reverse—a projector] — where you can stop, freeze frame, go forward, back up and zoom in.
“And we were viewing the Apollo 14 footage, coming around the backside of the Moon as we were approaching a large crater. Now, due to the sun angle on the front side [of the Moon] that you would be looking at (you’d probably be looking at more of a crescent at that point on the backside) in the shadows in the craters, covering about half the crater, this particularly large crater showed a cluster of about five or six lights down inside the rim.
“And this column or plume—or out-gassing or something, coming up above the rim of the crater, where we could see that— at that point Dr. Page had me stop and freeze, and back up; and go back and forth several times. And each time, he’d pause a second and look… and he finally turned to his associates and said: ‘Well, isn’t that interesting!’ And they all chuckled and laughed, and Dr. Page said: ‘Continue.’
“Well, I finished up that viewing and I was told to check it [the on-board sequence camera film] back into NASA bonded storage in the photo lab. The next day, I was to check it back out and show it to the rank-and-file engineers and scientists at the [Manned Spacecraft] Center.
“While we were viewing it the second time—and, several of my friends were sitting next to me—I was telling them: ‘You can’t believe what we saw on the backside of the Moon! Wait until you see this view.’
“And, as we were approaching the same crater… and we went past the crater— there was nothing there!
“I stopped the camera, took the film out to examine it—to see if anything had been cut out—and there was no evidence of anything being cut out. I told the audience that we were having ‘ technical difficulties,’ put it back in and finished.
“That afternoon, I ran into Dr. Page over at the Lunar Receiving Laboratory and asked him what had happened to ‘the lights and the out-gassing or steam we saw,’ and he kind of grinned and gave me a little twinkle and a chuckle and said: ‘There were no lights. There is nothing there.’
“And he walked away. And, we were so busy… I didn’t get a chance to question him again.”
Johnston had also observed various oddities with the still camera images. Once, while passing through a classified building on the Center he normally didn’t frequent, Ken observed artists airbrushing the “sky” in various photos. That in itself wasn’t unusual, as press release prints were regularly cleaned up. What bothered Johnston in this case was that these weren’t prints that were being airbrushed, but rather photographic negatives—meaning that, after that drastic process had been applied, the original data could never be reproduced in the form it had originally been taken.
That was bad enough. But what NASA attempted to force Johnston to do later was even worse. As we recounted it in Dark Mission:
…in 1972, near the end of the manned lunar program, Johnston was called into the office of Bud Laskawa, Johnston’s lead at the LRL records division. At the meeting, Laskawa told Johnston that orders had come down from NASA Headquarters (through Dr. Michael Duke, Laskawa and Johnston’s NASA boss) to destroy all of the copies of the original lunar photography that he had been protecting and archiving for the past several years.
Johnston was dumbfounded that anyone could order the destruction of the official photographic record of Mankind’s first venture beyond the earth. He protested, and begged to be allowed to donate the photographs to various universities or foundations, but was told there was “no chance.” The orders were explicit—he was to destroy all four sets of the literally tens of thousands of Apollo lunar photos taken by the astronauts.
Johnston found this situation unconscionable. Eventually, after further protests, he relented and destroyed three full sets of the data—but with his guilt eating away at him, he decided to save one complete set “elsewhere.” Some of the images and negatives he kept for himself. However, since the collection was so vast, he eventually decided to donate the rest to his alma mater, Oklahoma City University, where the data quietly resided—out of NASA’s oversight—for over thirty years…
Unfortunately, when Johnston and Hoagland went to Oklahoma City University and attempted to retrieve the photos, they found that a retired professor had apparently absconded with most of them, leaving only about a thousand first generation prints in Ken’s personal collection to examine.
A close examination of Ken’s surviving photos revealed overwhelming evidence that the lunar scaffolding model was correct. And it also raised the question of just why NASA would want these nearly priceless photos destroyed.
Because Ken’s photos are prints, rather than negatives, theoretically they are of lesser value than what is currently in the NASA archives. But in reality, this is not the case. The original negatives are kept in a sealed vault in NASA’s Houston facility, and have only rarely been seen by outsiders. The negatives currently at sites like the National Space Science Data Center in Maryland and in other official NASA archives are in fact multi-generational copies of (theoretically) those originals. In other words, a copy of copy of a copy, at the very least. Ken’s prints however, were first generation, made from those rare original negatives. By that alone, they must have contained more information than the best of NASA’s archive negatives do today. And what they showed was astounding.
NASA photo AS14-66-9301.
In going over Ken’s collection, a couple of images immediately stood out. The first was Apollo 14 photograph AS14-66-9301, now known as the (in) famous “Mitchell Under Glass” frame.
At first, AS14-66-9301 seems to be a very innocuous photo of the lunar surface. Taken as part of a landing site panorama by astronaut Alan Sheppard, it shows Lunar Module pilot Edgar Mitchell setting up a scientific experiment in the foreground and a substantial amount of lunar “sky” in the background. The interest began when Ken’s wife Fran noticed something odd in that background. “Why is the sky blue?” she asked.
Looking closer, it was easy to see an odd blue spec on the image in the sky above the landing site. Because of the very short exposure times of the surface photography (on the order of 1/250th of a second) there was no way it could be something in space or far beyond the landing site. It is a common misconception that you should be able to see stars and other faint, far-off objects in photos from the lunar surface. In reality, the sky should be absolute, seamless black. Unless it was a photographic defect, the blue spec had to be something very close to the landing site itself.
Ultra close-up of specular reflection and geometric structures from AS14-66-9301.
Under enhancement, the blue spec turned out to be a blue-scattered specular reflection off of the same type of towering, lattice-work structure that was seen at Sinus Medii. Since the Apollo 14 landing site was well away from Sinus Medii in the Ocean of Storms (Oceanus Procellarum) it could not be the same structure. It could only be a completely different set of similar but separate transparent, glass-like Ancient Alien ruins.
Further examination of the image and the rest of the panorama revealed that the Apollo 14 Lunar Module Antares had landed literally right in the middle of a vast complex of these towering glass structures in the Ocean of Storms. Not only that, but these structures behaved exactly as they should under light scattering from the sun, brighter near the light source and 180 degrees from it, and darker the farther away from the light source. In other words, if the structures seen in the images were photographic defects, then they were photographic defects that scattered light exactly as if they were real, glass-like transparent structures on the surface of th
e Moon. But the real “smoking gun” came when the photos were compared to another Apollo mission; Apollo 12.
Apollo 12 had landed on the in the Ocean of Storms some 22 months earlier, at a site only 122 miles away. In theory, a comparison of images from the two landing sites might shed some light on whether these enormous structures were really there on the surface of the Moon. If the same towering, megalithic edifices could be seen images from both missions, then that would be a final confirmation that these were real structures and not any kind of photo defect.
AS14-66-9301 showing angled support structure from Apollo 14 landing site.
The focus was immediately on the brilliant blue specular reflection seen in the Mitchell Under Glass photo. The source of the reflection seemed to be embedded in a lattice work of filaments and supports at 90 degree angles to the local lunar surface. But behind the reflection was a series of slanted, inclined support structures visibly connecting with lunar surface at an angle. If these massive and distinctive features could be spotted in some imagery from Apollo 12 as well, it would be the proverbial smoking gun.
AS 14-66-9301
An initial search of the Apollo 12 hand held photography was disappointing. The sky in many of the images showed signs of being white-washed (or “black-washed,” in this case) and while a few spectacular photos were found, none of them were pointed in the direction of the Apollo 14 landing site, where (theoretically) these massive inclined buttresses might be spotted. In addition, there was no video to work from, since astronaut Alan Bean had inexplicably pointed the Intrepid’s TV camera right at the sun almost immediately after the astronauts began their first Extra Vehicular Activity, burning it out. Given that he was specifically trained not to make such a mistake, I tend to wonder if maybe someone at NASA was worried about what might actually be visible in the TV images. Apollo 11 hadn’t had that problem, since it was mostly a symbolic mission that landed in the middle of nowhere.
It wasn’t until Hoagland began examining some early NASA promotional films that he struck gold. At the height of the Apollo Program, when new lunar landing missions were coming every few months, NASA’s Public Affairs Offices were busy churning out promotional films and press release photos. Their job was to try to communicate the on-going success of Apollo to the American people and the Congress through the press. Their primary tools in that era (remember, this was long before the Internet) were mainly newspapers and four-color, glossy magazines—like Life and National Geographic, as well as television. For the magazines, they provided high-quality still photographs, and for television and school classrooms they provided a series of short films focusing on each new mission as it successfully ended.
Apollo 12 image showing astronaut Alan Bean in front of glass like lunar structures beyond the horizon.
It was possible that this extraordinary time-pressure on NASA Public Affairs to get the word out might really have allowed the “real stuff” — photographic details of what the crews really saw and photographed upon the Moon to slip through the cracks. Just after Apollo 12, NASA had released just such 16mm film, called Pinpoint for Science.
Screen capture from NASA film Pinpoint for Science (left) and from Apollo 14 photo AS14-66-9301, showing the same angled, structural buttresses over the horizon from 2 different lunar landing sites. The Apollo 12 Lunar Module Intrepid is visible on the left.
After having an NSSDC 16mm print of Pinpoint for Science transferred to video, screen grabs were made and enhanced from the resulting video in the computer. The enhanced 16mm frames unquestionably revealed more of the reflective, glass-like ruins over the horizon from the Apollo 12 landing site, and the same massive inclined buttresses, slanting down beyond the lunar horizon in the distance. Bright star-like objects sparkled amid the amazing, steeply-pitched, stair-stepped lunar ruins, still attached to the visible but shattered geometric framework of the once vast lunar scaffolding that stretched miles overhead.
Given that two Apollo missions, 14 and now 12, had photographed the same crystalline geometry from two different locations and using two different photographic methods (70mm photographs and 16mm film), it’s safe to say that we’ve found the ground truth we are looking for. But there is so much more…
The Russian Connection
It’s not unreasonable to ask at this point why the Russians haven’t ever chimed in on the subject. While they never actually put a man on the Moon, they certainly sent plenty of unmanned probes and those probes carried cameras, just as the NASA missions did. Unfortunately, much of the data gathered by a variety of Soviet space probes was (and still is) inexplicably off-limits to researchers from the West. Even after the Cold War officially ended, the flow of data from Russia did not expand, and at one point a private researcher was told in no uncertain terms to stop looking for lunar data from the Soviet era.
However, over the years a few choice items have emerged in the West. Back in the mid 1960’s, the Soviet’s had created the Zond series of spacecraft which were designed to conduct flyby’s of various planets, including the Moon, Venus and Mars. Even by the standards of the time, the Zond probes were somewhat primitive, lacking the ability to place themselves in orbit around their intended targets and carrying cameras that were well below the quality of the instruments on American probes like the Lunar Orbiter series. Zond 1 and Zond 2 were initially successful, being sent to Venus and Mars respectively. It was thought in the West that Zond 3 was intended as a companion mission to Zond 2, and that perhaps the two spacecraft were intended to meet up in orbit around Mars. However, for reasons unknown, Zond 3 missed its launch window in 1964 and was instead launched in 1965 on a Mars trajectory, even though Mars was no longer in the same location. As a result, it was useful only as a guidance/telemetry test vehicle, and its only real data would be acquired in the flyby of the Moon that was needed to place it on a Mars orbit trajectory.
Zond 3 photo showing 20-mile high tower west of Oceanus Procellarum.
The 20 mile-high Zond 3 tower in close-up.
As it passed by the Moon with a closest approach distance of some 5,716 miles, the Zond 3 spacecraft snapped 23 photos and took 3 spectral images of the lunar far side. Centered mostly over the Mare Orientale impact basin, most of the images were fairly non-descript. But two stood out as completely remarkable. The first image (frame 25) was first published in defense contractor TRW’s Solar System Log magazine in 1967. It shows yet another tower, sticking straight up from the lunar surface along the visible limb of the Moon.
This remarkable object is actually anchored somewhere over the horizon, near the towering structures on the western edge of Oceanus Procellarum that were visible from the ground by Apollo’s 12 and 14. Again, by definition such an object (which is at least 20 miles high) has to be artificial because no natural object could be standing upright against the incessant meteoric rain of the last 4.5 billion years of the Moon’s existence.
Close-up enhancements of the image shows that not only does the Zond 3 tower appear to be anchored at a point over the horizon, there are some odd and very geometric looking objects next to it. Again, a natural looking lunar horizon should be very smooth, not broken up as the area around the tower is, and of course nothing like the tower should be there at all…
The next Zond 3 image, taken thirty-four seconds later, had no tower visible at all, indicating it had, by that time, slipped over the lunar horizon due to the fast moving Soviet spacecraft’s’ motion and direction. After the tower vanished out of view, it was immediately replaced by an equally anomalous feature, found on image frame 28.
The second amazing Zond 3 shot was originally found in an official NASA publication, Exploring Space with a Camera (NASA SP-168, 1968), but is now available in high-resolution on the internet.
Located on the lunar horizon approximately a thousand miles further to the south, a large, eroded dome-like structure was plainly visible in the lower right corner of the image. Again, this “Zond 3 dome” extended several miles above the airless lunar horiz
on against black space. And, like the earlier “Zond tower,” neatly aligned with the local vertical.
A close-up of this second Zond 3 dome reveals a significant amount of deterioration, undoubtedly due to long term exposure to the effects of meteor erosion. That said, the outline of a very geometric, structural building extending miles above the Moon is still clearly defined. Above the dome, the smaller remnants of what appears to be a lattice work type structure are visible under enhancement. Based on this, I suspect that what Zond 3 captured was in fact the battered remains of a watch crystal type of dome just beneath the larger protecting scaffolding we’ve seen other places on the lunar surface. Such an arrangement would provide an ideal engineering solution to the long-term issues involved with lunar habitation. Without an atmosphere to protect it from even the most mundane, everyday kinds of meteor strikes, a lunar base would stand little chance of surviving beyond a few years. But with a multilayered, miles-high scaffolding structure at the top and then smaller reinforcing “watch crystal” domes underneath, a lunar base might conceivably survive for hundreds of thousands if not millions of years.
Zond 3 photo showing massive dome in lower right-hand corner.
But there is ground truth, and then there is ground truth. The next obvious question is if these towering structures were all around the astronauts as they descended to and then explored the lunar surface, why didn’t they see them? And if they did, why then did they not comment on them?
Close-up of the lunar “dome”—from Zond-3 (July 20, 1965).
The first question is actually the easier one to answer. But the second one is the more revealing. After all, what if they did see these structures, but somehow just forgot that they did?