by Mike Bara
The True Colors of the Moon
If in fact there are these towering glass structures all over the Moon, scattering the light in geometric patterns all over the place, as in the Apollo 14 “Mitchell Under Glass” panorama, then that would go a long way to explaining the numerous reports of Transient Lunar Phenomena over the years. Instead of unlikely “outgassing” events, the observers were merely seeing specular reflections of specific panes of glass over the lunar surface. When the Moon moved a little bit, the phase angle of the reflected sunlight changes and the brilliant flashes of light go out. But this does not explain the odd changes in color that were observed repeatedly over the centuries. What could cause them?
Well, when light hits a glass surface, it tends, depending on the shape of the glass, to be bent and/or distorted. But, the glass doesn’t stop the ray of light, although it might change its direction. The effect is the same as if you shined light through a glass prism.
In addition to reflection, the other hallmark signature of glass is its ability for refraction—to bend light by slowing it down as the light passes through the glass. But light doesn’t slow down (bend) uniformly when entering or leaving a transparent medium, like glass. It bends selectively, depending on the wavelength and the angle. This is the basic physics of a prism. Higher frequencies (shorter wavelengths, like blue and violet) are slowed down more. Thus, they are deflected through a greater angle of “dispersion” than lower (longer) wavelengths, like orange and red.
This results in the classic “rainbow” seen after light has passed through anything transparent, including glass, water droplets, ice, quartz crystals, or any refractive medium capable of differentially bending (slowing down the velocity of) light, compared to its velocity in a vacuum.
So if there really were massive amounts of transparent (glass) material on the surface of the Moon, the one proof of that hypothesis would be that the lunar surface below (and remnants of the structures above) should be all the colors of the rainbow, and all the colors in between. We should see not just red, green and blue, but pink and purple and yellow. But, didn’t astronauts uniformly describe the Moon’s surface as grey and colorless, a “magnificent desolation” of blandness? And didn’t the pictures that were returned show the same thing?
Well, yes. But if you look at most photos of the astronauts on the lunar surface from that era, you’ll also notice that the colors on their spacesuits are inexplicably faded. The fact is that most of these images have had the color toned down on them, to reflect the NASA position that the surface of the Moon is bland and nearly colorless. All you have to do is turn up the volume on the color, by increasing the saturation, and a whole different picture emerges.
Images, like the one below (NASA frame AS17-137-20990) show that not only is the lunar surface multi-colored, but those colors vary from place to place, just as they would if sunlight were being scattered by the towering glass structures. Instead of seeing a bland grey landscape, the Moon literally comes alive with pink mountains, blue rocks and purple boulders.
NASA frame AS17-137-20990. In the color version, orange soil in the foreground is caused by iron oxidation in the soil, not from overhead prismatic effects. There are purple and pink rocks and mountains in the background of the color version of this photo.
And the experiment was repeatable, using downloaded versions of NASA own scans of their archived images. Everywhere we looked, the Moon became a colorful, interesting place.
This also explains the earlier Surveyor images that came back inexplicably colorful. Without knowing it, NASA had landed beneath a virtual sea of glass prisms which turned the lunar surface into a kaleidoscope of colors.
But again, this brings back the question of just how the astronauts could have missed all this. The short answer is they didn’t. At least not one of them.
Alan LaVern Bean was the Lunar Module Pilot for the Apollo 12 mission and the fourth human being to walk on the surface of the Moon. After returning from the Moon, he later flew on one of the Skylab missions and then retired from NASA in 1981 to devote his life to painting. Along the way, he made paintings of his experiences on the Moon with Pete Conrad on Apollo 12.
Self portrait of Alan Bean on the lunar surface. It has the exact color match for the Apollo 17 photos of yellows and reds.
At first, these paintings depicted the lunar surface as we had all been told it was; bland and grey and colorless. But he then began to rethink his work, and as he did so, the images got more and more colorful until eventually they matched not only the colorful images we now see under enhancement, but the far-distant structures as well.
One of Bean’s paintings, “Rock and Roll on the Ocean of Storms,” not only shows the distinct pink and blue colored lunar surface, it also shows lines in the sky that are eerily reminiscent of the “inclined buttress” structures seen in both the Apollo 14 photography and the Apollo 12 16mm film.
Now, these angled lines are actually the imprint of a moon boot that Bean puts on all of his paintings of the Moon, but there is no doubt that the placement of it and effect it has recalls the slanted structures seen in the Apollo images.
But these paintings all raise the question of just how well Bean truly remembers what he saw on the Moon. The fact that he was dissatisfied with the depictions that showed the lunar surface to look like the official NASA version is telling. His need to add color to the Moon’s surface in his paintings (“I had to figure out a way to add color to the Moon without ruining it,” he is quoted as saying) is also telling. Why? Maybe because there was something naggingly wrong with Moon as NASA chooses to depict it. Because of this, I think it is possible that Bean, like many of the other astronauts, has a hard time remembering what he saw and did on the Moon. There have always been rumors that the astronauts were hypnotized during their technical debriefings to “help them remember.” Given Bean’s apparent struggle with getting his artistic depiction of the Moon “right,” I tend to think this is likely.
“Rock and Roll on the Ocean of Storms” by Alan Bean.
I also take Bean’s paintings as independent verification that the lunar dome hypothesis is correct, and that the Moon is far more colorful than we’ve been led to believe.
Which brings us to the first question; could the astronauts have simply missed seeing these towering lunar structures?
Again, the short answer is no. While the astronauts had filters on their helmets to supposedly help block out ultraviolet rays, these filters would most likely have helped, rather than hindered their ability to “see” the towering glass ruins in the distance. These ultraviolet filters were gold screens (similar to those used on fighter planes today) that could be slid down over the visors. These gold filters had the effect of actually enhancing light in the blue end of the visual spectrum, and we know that these enormous structures (due to a phenomenon called Rayleigh scattering) tend to shift light into exactly that same end of the color spectrum. So if anything, the gold visors would have made it easier to see the distant glass structures, not harder.
And there is one other piece of evidence that supports the idea that NASA had a pretty good idea about the lunar domes before they ever sent men to the Moon—the landing of Apollo 11.
By now, we’ve probably all seen the dramatic footage over and over again; the tense mission control engineers, the drama of Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin calling out the dwindling fuel resources, Neil Armstrong having to take over the controls manually to clear a field of boulders, and the scary “1202” alarm that no one could figure out. And then finally the dramatic “The Eagle has landed,” call from Tranquility Base and the relief from “a bunch of guys about to blue” in Mission Control in Houston. But in reality, there is something far more telling about Eagle’s dramatic descent to the lunar surface; what caused the “1202” alarm in the first place?
We now know, thanks to outlets like NASA TV and the History Channel, that the 1202 alarm was a computer overload alarm. A modern cell phone has thousands of times the computi
ng power that the Lunar Module did on that fateful day in 1969, so it might seem like overloading such a primitive computer was fairly easy to do. Not so. In fact, the 1202 computer alarm was so rare that it had not ever even come up NASA’s landing simulations prior to the Apollo 11 landing. When it happened and the computer reset, Armstrong called back to Mission Control for an interpretation and was preparing to abort the landing if he didn’t get the answer he wanted. In fact, according to Aldrin, he actually had his hand on the abort trigger while they waited for word from NASA as to the nature of the warning.
As it turns out, the reason for the 1202 alarm was that there were too many systems active on the Eagle and too much data was coming in. This was because Aldrin had done something he was not supposed to do; he turned on two different radars.
Unbeknownst to most people, the Lunar Module was equipped with two different radar systems, a landing radar and rendezvous radar. The landing radar was (obviously) downward looking and the rendezvous radar was side looking. According to the checklist, Aldrin was only supposed to activate the landing radar, but instead he activated both the landing radar and the rendezvous radar. As a result, the computer was overloaded with data and had to shut down and reset, hence the dramatic “1202” alarm.1
But the big question is why would he do this? If the Moon is exactly as NASA portrays it, then there is no need for anything but the landing radar. There are no towering glass structures to worry about hitting, so all you need to know is your altitude above the landing site. Since the Apollo 11 landing site was in virtually the middle of nowhere in the Sea of Tranquility, with no mountains around the flat plain for hundreds of miles, there was no need to worry about getting too close anything on the way down. But if Aldrin knew there were transparent, immense structures all over the Moon, then activating the side-looking rendezvous radar would have been a natural precaution.
So the next question is fairly obvious as well; if there are glass ruins on the Moon, where exactly is the rest of it located? As we’ll see, it’s all over the place. But one of the most interesting regions is someplace we never even landed—Mare Crisium.
1 E-mail communication from Ken Johnston Jr. to the author. July 2, 2004.
Close-up of NASA color image AS16-120-19187 showing blue-shifted glass structures obscuring view of Earthrise.
NASA color image AS16-120-19187, showing glass-like intervening medium obscuring the lunar landscape.
4 different versions of AS14-66-9301 showing glass ruins over the horizon. (NASA)
Geometric glass structures over Sinus Medii from NASA image AS10-324816.
AS14-66-9301 The “Mitchell Under Glass” image from the Ken Johnston Collection.
Apollo 12 image showing astronaut Alan Bean in front of glass like lunar structures beyond the horizon.
Self portrait of astronaut Alan Bean.
Imagined lunar dome as it might have appeared eons ago.
CHAPTER FIVE
MARE CRISIUM
It is very strange the way the ejecta from Proclus
crosses Crisium. It is almost like flying above a haze
layer and looking down through the haze.
It looks like it is suspended over it.
– Al Worden, Apollo 15 Command Module Pilot
Mare Crisium (the “Sea of Crises”) is dark colored, 350 mile wide “pond-effect” impact basin in the northern hemisphere of the Moon, just northeast of the Sea of Tranquility. Centered roughly 20° north and 60° east, it is near the eastern edge of the face of the Moon visible from Earth. It has relatively few major features, of which the major craters Proclus, Picard, Pierce and Cleomedes are the most prominent. The entire Crisium basin covers an area of about 65,000 square miles and is the source of one of the gravitational anomalies known as “mascons” (or mass concentrations) that I mentioned in the first chapter. No one knows what causes the mascons, but the most likely scenario is that there is a buried chunk of the asteroid or comet that created the mare basin beneath the surface. It has a geometric appearance, a roughly hexagonal shape, and is the source of a number of enduring mysteries of lunar anomaly investigation.
NASA photo AS15-M-0954.
The standard model for Crisium’s smooth, dark appearance is that sometime after the major bombardment of the Moon which formed most of its plentiful craters, a large object struck the lunar surface with such force that it made the area within the boundaries of Crisium molten. After some period of time, the area cooled and dark “basaltic lavas” (volcanic rocks) gave the region its dark, pond like appearance. Most of the visible craters in Mare Crisium are most probably smaller (and later) impacts that upset the relatively smooth surface of the “pond.” This would seem to be supported at least in part by the presence of the mascon, which as stated above may be the remnants of the impact event which formed the region. None of this however explains how the region ended up shaped like a hexagon. It should have a rounded outline, like all other “normal” impact basins.
Telescopic view of hexagonal Mare Crisium impact basin.
Mare Crisium is also the location of at least 12 Transient Lunar Phenomenon reports over the years. In 1882, an English mechanic who was also an amateur astronomer named J.G. Jackson made the following observation of Crisium:
Last evening (May 19th) on observing the moon’s slender crescent, about two days old, I was struck with a very peculiar appearance on the westerly side of Mare Crisium, just on, or immediately within, the dark of the ‘terminator. ’ It seemed a curved feathery mist or cloud lying just over the edge of the ‘Mare,’ and against the spur or range of mountains bounding the westerly side of the great valley. It seemed to be divided longitudinally by a faint dark line, and looked not unlike a feather. It must have been more than 100 miles long, by 40 or 50 miles wide. The definition was excellent, and I watched it for nearly an hour, showing it to several friends. In colour and appearance it was so strikingly different from the other illuminated parts, and so different from anything else I have ever seen on the moon, that I scarcely think it possible to be mistaken in its vapory character.1
In 1897, an astronomer named Jasper D. Hardy added to the lore in a report in an issue of the British Astronomical Associations Journal: “Now, at various times when studying the floor of Mare Crisium, I have noticed waves of light and shade, so that it was difficult at times to see objects with which I was perfectly familiar. Also clouds have passed over the object I have been viewing. These clouds have been seen by other observers, and are mentioned in Neison. That they belong to the moon there can be no doubt, and I gradually come to the conclusion that vapor of some kind still existed on the moon. I had my surmises verified on one particularly fine night (the best I ever had) when I plainly saw a well-defined cloud pass over the object I was copying.”2
Another, more anonymous observation was reprinted in the science anthology W.R. Corliss’s Mysterious Universe; a handbook of astronomical anomalies:
Mr. Robert M. Adams has called to our attention a curious lunar observation by Mr. Robert Miles of Woodland, California, an observation rather reminiscent of Mr. Brian Warner’s article on pages 130-131 of our November-December 1955 issue.
Mr. Miles says in part:
“I noticed a flash of white light that caught my eye. At first I thought it could have been a lunar meteor. But it kept flashing on and off… The light was very bright but changed its color to a very bright blue, like an arch light. It was brighter than the sunlit portions that I was looking at.”
Sketches indicate that the object in question lay on the night side of the terminator and perhaps about 100 miles east of the gap in the mountains on the east boundary of the Mare Crisium. Mr. Miles found the duration of visibility of the flashing light to be from 3:00 to 4:30 U.T. on January 17, 1956. The colongitude was then 320°.5 to 321°.3. These colongitudes seem inconsistent with the sketches, and the editor suspects that the U.T. date was really January 16.3
What each of these observations correlate, both in the transient
manner of their observation and in the variance of color is that there seems to be historical evidence supporting the glass scaffolding theory over Mare Crisium. As we discussed in the previous chapter, light reflecting off of panes of glass and passing through multiple layers of glass would of course produce multi-colored specular reflections. Such light phenomena would obviously be transient in nature, ending when the Moon and Earth moved relative to the light source (the Sun). And the hazy, vaporous appearance is consistent with the observations made by Apollo 15 astronaut Al Worden at the beginning of this chapter. As panes of glass are illuminated, shattered remnants of the more beaten down edges of the structures will have a hazy appearance—like frosted glass — causing the illusion of being cloud-like.
But none of these less well known observations had the impact of a much more prominent anomaly in the Crisium region; the so-called “Mare Crisium bridge.”
The first hint of controversy around the bridge was noted on July 30th, 1953 when a science writer for the New York Herald Tribune, John J. O’Neill, first spotted and reported observation of what he described as a natural “bridge” over two ridges in the Mare Crisium region near the crater Picard. Excited, O’Neill asked several prominent lunar researchers of the day to confirm his discovery.
Fairly quickly, a British astronomer named Dr. H. P. Wilkins did just that. He first reported his findings in a February 13th, 1954 issue of the Sunday tabloid The Illustrated.4 He also published a more official paper on the bridge in the British Astronomical Association’s Journal in February 1954 which included more sketches of his own observations. His characterizations at that time were of basically along two lines. First, he confirmed that he himself had seen what he thought was the same bridge across the two ridges that O’Neill had seen, and second, at least in this context, he asserted his belief that the “bridge” was a natural erosive formation on the Moon. Given that this presentation was in an official scientific journal, his caution is unsurprising.