First Man

by James R. Hansen

  Inevitably, there were people who not only chose to believe in some version of the lunar conspiracy theory, but who saw a way to profit from it. In 1999, Fox TV broadcast a “documentary” entitled Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon? The program was based largely on a low-budget commercial video produced by a self-proclaimed “investigative reporter” from Nashville, Tennessee. Called A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Moon, it speculated that the Moon landings were an ingenious ploy of the U.S. government to win the Cold War and stimulate the collapse of Soviet communism by forcing the Kremlin into investing massive sums of money on its own lunar program, thereby ruining the Russian economy and provoking the internal downfall of the government.

  No matter that every piece of “evidence” raised by the sensationalistic program was parroting the same uninformed arguments about Apollo that had been around for over two decades—i.e., that the American flag planted by Apollo 11 appears to be waving in a place where there can be no wind; that there are no stars in any of the photographs taken on the lunar surface; that the photographs taken by the Apollo astronauts are simply “too good” to be true; that the 200-degree-plus Moon surface temperatures would have baked the camera film; that the force of the LM’s descent engine should have created a crater under the module; that no one can travel safely through the “killer radiation” of the Van Allen Belts; and more. Some members of the TV viewing audience succumbed to the trickery, others to its darker legacy.

  On his seventieth birthday in August 2000, Armstrong received a birthday card containing a belligerent typewritten letter from a teacher charging that the Moon landing was a hoax and inviting Neil to review the “evidence” on the Internet.

  Dear Mr. Armstrong:

  The least I could do was send a card for your 70th birthday, however over30 years on from the pathetic TV broadcast when you fooled everyone by claiming to have walked upon the Moon, I would like to point out that you, and the other astronauts, are making yourselfs [sic] a worldwide laughing stock, thanks to the Internet.

  Perhaps you are totally unaware of all the evidence circulating the globe via the Internet. Everyone now knows the whole saga was faked, and the evidence is there for all to see. We know the pictures have pasted backgrounds, who composed the pictures, and how the lunar landing and Moon walks were simulated at Langley Research Centre, in addition to whyNASA faked Apollo.

  Maybe you are one of those pensioners who do not surf the Internet, because you know precious little about how it works. May I suggest you visit [Web site withheld by author] to see for yourself how ridiculous the Moon landing claim looks 30 years on.

  As a teacher of young children, I have a duty to tell them history as it truly happened, and not a pack of lies and deceit.

  [Name withheld by author]

  Armstrong sent the birthday card and letter on to NASA’s associate administrator for policy and plans. “Has NASA ever refuted the allegations or assembled information to be used in rebuttal? I occasionally am asked questions in public forums and feel I don’t do as good a job as I might with more complete information,” said Neil. Subsequently, in 2002, NASA commissioned distinguished space writer and veteran UFO debunker James Oberg to write a 30,000-word monograph refuting the notion that the Apollo program was a hoax. After news of the plan for Oberg’s book hit the papers, however, NASA quickly reversed course, judging that not even a judicious, well-argued refutation could successfully achieve its intended effect.

  To all inquiries about the Moon hoax, Vivian White sends out the following letter:

  Dear ___:

  I am responding on behalf of Mr. Armstrong to your recent letter regarding the reality of the Apollo program flights.

  The flights are undisputed in the scientific and technical worlds. All of the reputable scientific societies affirm the flights and their results.

  The crews were observed to enter their spacecraft in Florida and observed to be recovered in the Pacific Ocean. The flights were tracked by radars in a number of countries thoughout their flight to the Moon and return. The crew sent television pictures of the voyage including flying over the lunar landscape and on the surface, pictures of lunar scenes previously unknown and now confirmed. The crews returned samples from the lunar surface including some minerals never found on Earth.

  Mr. Armstrong believes that the only thing more difficult to achieve than the lunar flights would be to successfully fake them.

  Mr. Armstrong accepts that individuals may believe whatever they wish.He was, however, substantially offended by the FOX program’s implication that his fellow Apollo crewmen were possible accomplices in the murder of his very good friends, Grissom, White, and Chaffee, and he has indicated his displeasure to FOX.

  We appreciate your inquiry and send best wishes.

  Sincerely,

  Vivian White

  Administrative Aide

  Neil understands the impulse of the conspiracy theorists, even if it is totally alien to his own rational mind. “One, people love conspiracy theories. They are very attracted to them. As I recall, after Franklin D. Roosevelt died, there were people saying that he was still alive someplace. And, of course, ‘Elvis lives!’ There is always going to be that fringe element on every subject, and I put this in that category. It doesn’t bother me. It will all pass in time. Generally, it’s almost unnoticeable except for the peaks that occur when somebody writes a book or puts out an article in a magazine or shows something on television.”

  Armstrong has also experienced one man’s attempt to turn Armstrong’s personal life into a television event of the stranger’s own devising.

  At the annual meeting of EDO Corporation stockholders in New York City in 2001, the man who made A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Moon showed up with a video-camera-carrying assistant. EDO president James Smith recalls the scene: “This guy shows up with a Bible and shouts out, ‘Neil Armstrong, will you swear on this Bible that you went to the Moon?’ Well, the audience immediately started booing the intruder very loud, but he went right on, ‘Everybody else in the world knows you didn’t, so why don’t you just admit it?!’ It quickly turned into a kind of pushy-shovy thing, so and I and a few other men got the guy out of there. Subsequent to that, we never had a meeting where we didn’t hire special security.”

  “Had I the opportunity to run that episode over in my life,” Armstrong comments, “I wouldn’t have allowed my company people to usher me out of the room. I would have just talked to the crowd and said, ‘This person believes that the United States government has committed fraud on all of you, and simultaneously he wants to exercise his right protected by the U.S. government to state his opinions freely to you.’”

  A few months after the EDO meeting, on September 9, 2002, the same man with Bible in hand confronted Buzz Aldrin outside of a Beverly Hills hotel. A resident of the Los Angeles area, Buzz had arrived at the hotel thinking he was to be interviewed by a Japanese educational television network. At first Aldrin, his stepdaughter in tow, tried to answer the man’s questions, then did his best to get away from him. But the insistent independent filmmaker dogged him out of the hotel and kept directing his assistant to keep the camera running, while shouting at Buzz, “You are a coward and a liar.” Harassed to the point of complete exasperation, the seventy-two-year-old Aldrin, all 160 pounds of him, decked the thirty-seven-year-old 250-pounder with a quick left hook to the jaw. The man from Nashville filed a police report but, after watching the accuser’s own tape of the incident, the L.A. County District Attorney rather forcefully declined to file charges.

  As the self-proclaimed “victim” later told reporters, “If I walked on the Moon and some guy said swear on a Bible, I’d swear on a stack of Bibles.”

  Even before the EDO and Aldrin incidents, the same individual entered uninvited into the Armstrongs’ suburban Cincinnati home. Neil’s second wife Carol relates what happened: “Neil was at the office. This guy knocked at the door and there was a big dog with him, and he had a pack
age. I opened the outside door while leaving the screen door shut, and the man said, ‘Is Neil here?’ I said, ‘No, he’s not. May I help you?’ He opened the screen door and just walked in, bringing along his dog. He said, ‘I want him to sign this,’ and I said, ‘Neil doesn’t sign things anymore.’ ‘He’ll sign this,’ he uttered, and then he left.

  “It sort of hit me three minutes later. All of a sudden I felt shaky.”

  In the following weeks, the interloper started putting letters and other things in the Armstrongs’ mailbox. Some of the materials had religious overtones and most were about the Moon landing being faked. The local police department responded, “It’s probably nothing, but why don’t you just bring the tapes and letters and we’ll take a look at them,” until a call to the ABC TV station in Nashville revealed that he had never worked there, but instead was an independent filmmaker who had operated a business called ABC Video.

  A few weeks later, Carol received a phone call from her neighbor: “Carol, there’s this car parked out here and it’s been out here for a long time.” When the neighbor went out to investigate, she saw a lot of camera equipment in the backseat. The siege continued for three days, culminating in a car chase involving the Armstrongs, the intruder, and the police.

  The high price of celebrity was a heavy burden that all of the early astronauts and their families had to pay, but none more dearly than the First Man—as personally unwanted as his status as a celebrity and global icon particularly was. It was an unwanted, unasked for, but inevitable, legacy that Armstrong shared with his hero, Lindbergh.

  CHAPTER 35

  Into the Heartland

  The few puffy clouds over the ski slopes at Snowmass were a meek harbinger of the major blizzard sweeping toward Aspen’s four snowcapped summits that February day in 1991. Neil rode to the top of the intermediate ski run known as Upper Hal’s Hollow with Doris Solacoff, whose husband, Kotcho, was Armstrong’s boyhood friend from Upper Sandusky. Neil’s brother Dean, recently divorced, completed the ski quartet, who had just finished lunch. Neil had eaten a big bowl of chili with plenty of onions.

  Neil remained so quiet throughout the ascent that Dorie took notice. A few hundred feet into her run, she observed Neil skiing down ever so slowly. “I don’t feel too well.” Noticing his face was pale and ashen, Dorie, a registered nurse, insisted on going for help. “No, just wait a second,” Neil hesitated, knowing what sort of fuss would be made over him. “I feel real weak. I think I’m going to sit down and rest here for a minute.”

  Doris Solacoff raced to contact the ski patrol. “I have a friend that I believe is having a heart attack, and I’ll tell you right where you need to come.”

  Down at the bottom of Upper Hal’s Hollow, Kotcho and Dean had started to worry. Finally, Dorie approached, shouting, “Neil has had a heart attack, and the ski patrol is bringing him down in the rescue toboggan!”

  The doctor on duty at the lodge infirmary confirmed a heart attack and administered atropine to stabilize a cardiac arrhythmia through an IV line. An ambulance transported him to Aspen Valley Hospital, where he was placed in the intensive care unit. There Armstrong experienced repeated episodes of bradycardia, or abnormal slowing down of the heart.

  Armstrong’s heart rate soon stabilized enough for a transfer to Denver, but the blizzard kept him in Aspen for three days. Practiced at protecting celebrities, the little resort hospital kept word of Armstrong’s heart attack secret.

  Kotcho, himself an Ohio physician, helped arrange for a transport by medivac from Aspen to a hospital in Cincinnati. There a team of heart specialists carried out a catheterization that linked the attack to a tiny aberrant blood vessel. The rest of his coronary arteries were clear of blockages of any kind; his heart tissue sustained only the slightest amount of permanent damage.

  Released the next day with no major restrictions, Armstrong took the heart specialist at his word and flew to a business meeting. Six months later, he passed his flight physical and was put back on full flight status.

  In the coming years, he would make many more visits to the Colorado ski slopes, once or twice with Kotcho, Dorie, and Dean. The trio now refers to Upper Hal’s Hollow as Neil’s Run.

  “The day Neil had his heart attack, he was in the process of separation from Janet,” explains Kotcho, “so I called his son Mark several times a day and gave him reports. The day after the attack, Janet called me and said that Gene Cernan had called her and told her about it. Gene had found out through the ski patrolman who brought Neil down, who happened to be one of Gene’s friends. Gene then called Jan. She thought the news was going to make front pages all over the world and the TV and everything.”

  What role stress played in Armstrong’s illness can never be known with certainty, but difficulties in his personal life had mounted during the previous twelve months leading up to the heart attack. His father Stephen died on February 3, 1990, in the Dorothy Love Retirement Community in Sidney, Ohio, south of Wapakoneta. His mother, Viola, passed away barely three months later. His parents, both age eighty-three, had been married for sixty years. Shortly before his mother’s death, Janet had left Neil, citing years of emotional distance.

  With Neil’s departure from NASA in 1971, Janet Armstrong had hoped for a new beginning in suburban Cincinnati. “My husband’s job was there, so that was where we went. He wanted to realize a more quiet life,” having “spent all those years in the program with little time for himself.”

  Lebanon was a typical small town—a rural bedroom community for Cincinnati and Dayton. “I had never lived in a small town. We drove all around the area and it was the best thing outside the beltway at that time. I remember we went into the ice cream parlor and just kind of cased the place. It seemed like a safe community and a good place to raise the children. We thought we were seeing people we could identify with in the town.”

  The nineteenth-century farmhouse had to be gutted. “Neil did not like debt and wouldn’t take out another loan, so it took seven years as we paid cash for the work to be done. It got so that the builder could answer the telephone if I wasn’t there and go pick the kids up at school! He just became part of the family! It was difficult on the kids and it was difficult on me.

  “It was easier for Mark than it was for Rick,” but both boys were teased for being Neil Armstrong’s son. According to Rick, “It was rough, but I learned to ignore it.” In Rick’s view, Mark had a little easier time of it: “He was much more of the social butterfly.” Rick recalls farm life as “an isolation that, I think, was driven a lot by what Dad was experiencing and it had a trickle-down effect on the rest of us.” Janet (and undoubtedly Neil as well) did not know that the boys were having it so rough: “It took me a couple of years before I caught on to that, because the boys wouldn’t say anything to me.”

  Neil did some chores around the 300-plus-acre farm, if not as many as Janet would have liked. “We started by carrying between seventy and ninety head of cattle. We grew corn, soybeans, hay, and wheat.” Asked whether she actually enjoyed doing the farmwork, Janet today replies, “It was something that had to be done. It was really difficult to shovel poop during the day and go out to a dinner party at night. ‘Well, what do you do?’ people would ask. Well, I was busy on the farm.”

  In 1981, a year after Neil resigned from UC, Neil and Janet became “empty-nesters” when Mark went away to Stanford University (Rick had since graduated from Wittenberg College in Ohio). “I don’t think it affected Neil at all, but it certainly affected me. I felt that this was a time when we could really do things together.” As it turned out, however, Neil, with all of his new corporate board responsibilities, wasn’t home any more than he had been before. “The kids have gone, Neil is gone, our dog Wendy had been stolen. We had no security system. I was stuck out there in the country.

  “Finally, I got tired of all this, and in 1987 I started a travel agency. In the beginning, it was cruises only. Then we added air and became a full-service travel agency. I sold that agency i
n 1993.”

  Janet’s frustrations with Neil rose as her dissatisfaction with her own life increased. She tried in vain to help him get better organized. “He had so many requests for speeches and so many this and so many that—he didn’t know where to start. He had to make decisions—and decision making seemed to be especially difficult for him at that time.

  “The man needed help. I couldn’t help him. He really didn’t want me helping him. He didn’t want to get angry with me, I suppose, or he didn’t want me to get angry at him. That was probably smart on his part. Vivian White used to get just beside herself. She just learned to go with the flow.”

  Janet also tried to plan vacations for the two of them, but Neil couldn’t commit—his schedule was always too busy. “I could not continue to live like that. He’d look at all sides of everything, and sometimes he’d discuss them—and I’d say, ‘Just do it!’ But he couldn’t, or just didn’t.

  “In November 1987 I asked him to go skiing, but he couldn’t work it into his schedule for another year.” Finally in late 1988 they made it out to the slopes at Park City, Utah, where Janet persuaded him it would be fun to have a vacation home. “He had free travel, the boys could come out, and we could have a place that was so convenient, and everybody liked to ski.” In early 1989, they bought a brand-new chalet-style home on the outskirts of Park City, one of the sites for the 1992 Winter Olympics. It could have been a turning point in their marriage if the couple had chosen to approach it that way, which neither did. “The fact was it took a whole year to get on his schedule to go away for a weekend! In a sense, I resented it. It really put the handwriting on the wall.”

  A matter of months after purchasing the Park City vacation home, Neil came home from a business trip to find a note from Janet on the kitchen table of their Lebanon farmhouse. The note said she was leaving him.