Barking At The Moon

The thing about empires is that they are very expensive to maintain.  It requires the ability to project force to any part of the empire in a short time.

The Romans built a massive empire based almost entirely on their ability to install well-built roads to the far-flung reaches of the provinces.  The roads were so well-built that many are still in use 2,000 years later.  Rome was able to move large armies quickly and efficiently anywhere there were signs of unrest.  They also allowed for efficient messaging between power centers and the most remote areas.

The British empire was built on its dominant navy.  Its warships allowed it to project irresistible force almost anywhere in the world quickly and efficiently.  That same prowess at sea also gave the British empire fabulous wealth and the ability to transfer information with relative speed.  See Rothschilds and Waterloo.

The American empire was built on its dominance of the air.  The first to recognize both the military and commercial benefits of air travel, America was able to project overwhelming force with near impunity.  That same technology also gave it the ability to transfer wealth and information at blazing speeds.

In all three cases, though, the empires collapsed because of failing economies caused by their inability to expand beyond the technology that brought them to power.  The Romans invested so much into their roads that they were unable to exploit the rising sea powers.  The British invested so much in their sea power that they were unable to exploit the rising air superiority.  And the US is failing because it has invested so much in air superiority that it doesn't have the resources left to exploit the next frontier - space.

In what has to be one of the silliest moves on the part of an incomprehensibly silly US Congress, a couple of Congresscritters have decided to introduce a bill making the Apollo landing sites on the Moon "national parks" and further declaring the Apollo 11 site a world cultural site, apparently forgetting the the UN does that sort of thing.

What makes this so amusingly silly is that America has not been able to project power beyond low Earth orbit (LEO) for nearly 50 years.  The move to declare these "parks" on the Moon is nothing more than an exercise in expanding the empire, but as we have seen, empires require the ability to move forces quickly and efficiently to any part of the territories.  However, the US has squandered its space superiority in order to pay for the monstrously expensive command and control apparati at home.

Not only has the US completely dismantled its manned space program, reduced now to hitching rides with other countries while waiting for private corporations to do the R&D necessary to have viable LEO technology, it has not returned a single human being to the Moon in 50 years.  That's two generations.  In other words, any claim it might have had is now defunct, since it has not returned to squat on its claim.  It's called abandonment.

Suppose I were a gold prospector.  I find a rich lode and run into town to file a claim.  I get a little distracted and start to get back out to the claim a couple of times, but by the time I really start to get concerned about it, I'm already old and now my grandson has to carry on, but my grandson is a babbling idiot because I didn't want him to get smart enough to outsmart me.  Consequently, he is unable to re-establish my original claim.  Should I really expect that no one else will come along and take the gold after 50 years with no one around to say otherwise?

Not only that, but in the 50 years I've been dicking around in town, I helped pass a law that says no one can stake a claim on the very land where I've staked a claim.

Thus, I'm too old to go back to the old land claim, my progeny are too stupid and controlled to think creatively about the problem, and I helped to make it illegal to have a claim in the first place.  BUT, don't you dare go digging gold on my claim!  Or I'll huff, and I'll puff and I'll hyperventilate.

In addition to all the above absurdities, these lunar landing areas are to be preserved as heritage sites, yet no one would be able to fly over them, set foot on them, or send robotic probes into them.  Huh?!  You mean like declaring Yosemite a national park and them forbidding people (the ones who actually own it by definition) to go into the park and look around at all that heritage?  Much less forbid Google Earth to fly over and take photos for us all to appreciate from our desktop command centers.

OK, I can see putting ropes around the Apollo 11 site and not allowing folks to trample on the First Footprint and all, but that will require people to erect the ropes and a permanent staff to man the ropes and control the crowds.  Then, there'll have to be parking areas and concessions and toilet facilities and visitor centers and interpretive guided tours and preservation teams...  After all, there's little patches of dirt in Big Bend, West Texas, that you're not allowed to touch under pain of jail time, despite the fact there's no one around for hundreds of miles.  C'mon.

At this point, if I decided to start a crowd-funding project to build a rover to go the the Apollo 11 site, the best the US could do is put a pile of engineers to work designing a program to investigate the design of a program to send two-and-a-half billion dollars worth of technology to fly around in circles and document in glorious detail how my little rover is destroying all of Buzz Aldrin's footprints.  Hardly projecting force, in my book.

So, to sum up all this foolishness, you have an empire.  You decide to make a claim on a piece of dirt that you once set foot on 50 years ago, but haven't been back to in all that time.  Furthermore, you don't have the money or ability to go back and stake out guards on that dirt.  On top of all that, you were the first person to sign into effect a law that forbids any nation from claiming ownership on that piece of dirt.  And finally, under long-established rules, anything abandoned on the high seas (especially for 50 years) is fair game for salvage.  Am I reading that right?

In other words, the White Star line still owns the Titanic and all the effects salvaged from that wreck, including photos and story rights, though the company was unable to return to the wreck and had abandoned it on the sea floor well over 50 years ago?  Furthermore, White Star wants to declare the wreck a 'park' now and no ship would be allowed to sail over that spot ever again, much less dive down and take photos or souvenirs?

Just wanted to make sure I had all this straight.

And what about the Russians?  Can they claim 'park' status for the sites where their hardware landed?  And the Japanese?  Can they claim a chunk of the lunar South Pole, since one of their craft crashed there?  And since the Apollo sites form a rough oval, can the US claim everything inside it?  And can the Russians claim the back side of the Moon, since they were the first to image it?  And what about Mars and all the rubble Mankind has strewn across it?  And while we're at it, why not declare the Frau Mare highlands a 'park', since Apollo 13 was supposed to land there and it made a great movie.  And let's not forget the proposed sites for Apollos 18 and 19, even though they got cancelled.  After all, we should preserve those sites the way they were back when the US almost landed there.  And what about Venus?  Can the Russians claim the whole planet since they're the only country to have successfully landed there?  And can Europe claim Titan?  Or do they have to share with the US, since they piggy-backed on the Cassini craft?

The problem gets really absurd really fast once you start thinking about it.  It's compounded by the fact that Apollo artifacts would fetch a pretty penny on eBay if someone was able to get up there and bring back some trinkets.  I'm sure come collector would pay a fortune for Neil Armstrong's poop bag.  Makes you want to go back and watch Salvage with Andy Griffith, and Isaac Asimov as the science adviser.  The pilot was really good, as I remember.

REVIEW: Dark Mission

Title: Dark Mission
Subtitle: The Secret History of NASA
Authors: Richard C. Hoagland and Mike Bara
Published by Feral House
ISBN: 978-1-932595-48-2
Copyright 2009 (revised edition)
soft cover, 616 pages, footnotes, B&W/color plates
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As anyone who has read Hoagland's work knows, he writes like a TeeVee pitchman and gets paid by the punctuation mark.  His style is a bit tiring after a while and trying to keep up with all the brackets, braces, ellipses, and quote marks wears on the reader.

Fortunately for the reader, he is tempered a bit by co-author Mike Bara.  Bara brings a somewhat steadier tone and muted hyperbole to the topic at hand.  That said, it is quite obvious which of the authors edited which parts of the book.

Style points aside, the information in the book is, in a word, astounding.  The authors begin in the late 1800s and build their case meticulously through the development of rocketry, Operation Paperclip, the formation of NASA, and finally up to today's headlines.

Their thesis comes down to the likely existence of life and the remains of an ancient, advanced civilization that spanned the solar system.  They go on to pain-stakingly build the case that some elements within NASA have been aware, even before landing on other moons and planets, that these things were there.  They also posit, based on a study commissioned by NASA in the early 60s called the "Brooking Report," that these groups have established a careful time-line of information release to literally engineer society to accept the profound implications of these discoveries.

The authors do a rather thorough job of outlining the 'invisible hand' behind the slow trickle of information and the deliberate social conditioning that the aware reader is already aware of, though may not yet be able to define.  In other words, the authors give the reader a pretty good idea of who "they" are, and what "they" are up to behind the scenes.

The authors take us on a sometimes tedious journey, event by event, mission by mission, to build their argument.  They provide the reader with ample examples, quotes, images, mathematical formulae, and documented events.  Even those who have closely followed Hoagland's work will gain new insight and additional background and many of his more astounding claims.

In a nutshell, Hoagland argues that NASA is composed of several competing groups.  At the most over-arching level, he speculates there are "owls" and "roosters."  The owls are seeking to hide and control any information beyond 'dirt and rocks,' concerning other solar system bodies.  The roosters are supposedly fighting to finally release the information and let the pieces fall where they may.

At a secondary level, Hoagland defines the Nazis, Masons and Wizards who, as he says, infest the inner workings of the space program.  All three groups, as the author notes, are steeped in ancient myths, rituals and beliefs, which color NASA's operations.  The Nazi's, of course, are von Braun's clique, brought to the US under Paperclip after WWII.  The Masons, obviously, are high-ranking members of that secret society.  The Wizards are along the lines of Jack Parsons, founder of JPL, who was a singularly strange character, who at one point, with his friend L. Ron Hubbard, tried to breed the Anti-Christ.  Lest one scoff, this is well-documented by Parson's own writings, as well as others.

The authors then go on to exhaustively document NASA's strange predilection for using ritualistic dates, stellar alignments and ancient symbology in practically every aspect of the operation.  They define five stellar objects and three specific points on the sky (horizon, 19.5 degrees and 33 degrees), and then carefully document how these select objects and alignments play heavily in virtually every aspect of the NASA program.

They go on to show the overwhelming use of certain symbols in official mission logos.  Certainly, even the casual observer can detect the common use of Orion throughout NASA's history.  The homage to the Egyptian goddess Isis becomes apparent, as well.  Blue triangles (symbol of the star Sirius) and even naming the space station ISS are but two.

The authors then move on to re-iterate all of Hoagland's efforts over the years.  Step by step and image by image, the reader is shown the rather large body of evidence pointing to what Hoagland calls "archologies" on multiple solar system bodies, particularly the Moon and Mars, but certainly not limited to those.  The authors are careful not to come outright and claim the existence of ET ruins, but they make a clear case for investing in more research, and at the very least, 'official' recognition that there are obvious mysteries with amazing implications for all of Mankind.

The authors, having built a solid case for their archologies, for NASA rituals, and for a hidden agenda, then turn to documenting multiple lines of evidence for extant life on Mars.  In this, as in the other arguments, they do not limit themselves to just NASA documentation.  They present findings from Russian, Japanese and European missions, as well.  The back up their own claims with those of other researchers, including NASA scientists.  Certainly, anyone who follows the space program knows of Dr. Gil Levin's decades-long quest to have the findings of his Viking life experiments re-examined.  Even at the time, it made headlines that Viking had found evidence of respiration, metabolism and circadian rhythms.

The authors go on to point out strong evidence of liquid water, mud, pools, lychens, algae, and even trees, which are commonly names after Arthur C. Clarke, who remarked unequivocally that they appeared to be huge trees, with trunks, branches and leaves.  At least as far as the water goes, NASA has admitted that much.

Hoagland and Bara lament the culture in which we live, where people require the admission of 'authorities' in order to believe the plain evidence of their senses.  One common question, not only leveled against the authors, but at independent researchers in general is, "How could 'they' keep something so big as proof of life off the Earth covered up for so long?"  The answer is quite simple, and the authors take great pains to try and overcome it, humans are biased against extraordinary information.  As a group, we will not accept what we plainly perceive, if the information is too far outside our daily experience.  We depend heavily on the blessing of 'authorities' to confirm or deny what we believe.

What comes through clearly in this book is the sense of awe and excitement engendered by these lines of inquiry.  In a sterile Universe in which humans are the pinnacle of creation, we might expect to find accidental patterns, such as the Old Man in the Mountain, or the Man On The Moon, but Mount Rushmore is rather unlikely.  This fact alone argues that the massive and growing amounts of evidence for artificial objects scattered throughout the solar system must point to an actual phenomenon.  If we are the first, and Neil Armstrong was the first of us to set foot off the Earth, then we should not find more than the occasional curiosity of Nature anywhere in our solar system, let alone Faces, pyramids, glass domes and tunnels, and buried cities.  We certainly shouldn't find green patches on Mars that expand and recede with the seasons.  What's more, shouldn't our 'civilian' agencies, for which we pay dearly, be giving us the truth?  At the bare minimum, they should be giving us the raw data that we paid for, so that we may investigate for ourselves.

The authors give the reader multiple examples of NASA's agenda by pointing to the many expensive missions to Mars that are tasked with single investigations.  Any evidence for other lines of inquiry are soundly denied and hidden.  In the case of Viking, even when the mission is ostensibly to find evidence of life on Mars, NASA simply denies the data that confirms the objective.

One prime example of this was the Phoenix lander.  The spacecraft cost billions of dollars and used thousands of man-hours, and when it landed, NASA made a huge deal of stating that it had found ice on the planet.  Any 13-year-old, for the price of a telescope and waiting for good viewing could have told us that.  The polar ice caps have been plainly obvious for well over a century.

Another example is the Spirit and Opportunity rovers.  Their mission was to find evidence of 'past' water on Mars.  The fact that they repeatedly bogged down in mud, took unmistakable photos of fossils and were routinely washed clean of collected dust did not deter NASA from its singular focus on sedimentary rocks and phosphates.  NASA even went as far as to destroy a number of fossils with the grinding tool, just to make the point that they weren't looking for those things.

By the end of the book, the reader is left with a distinct feeling of frustration, disappointment and even anger.  One ponders why an agency that is nominally public and receives billions of dollars of tax money can't seem to see their hands in front of their faces.  The anger comes from the occult rituals and obfuscating games that NASA has played with truly Earth-shaking information, and their flat-out refusal to investigate those things which the public, who pays their salaries, obviously want investigated.

Hoagland and Bara effectively argue their case, using multiple lines of evidence, documentation from disparate sources, and the unmistakable evidence of the data itself.  Multiple researchers, multiple investigations and even NASA's own history and admissions stand in stark contract to the agency's recalcitrant refusals to give the world the truth.

One could argue, as Hoagland and Bara do, that the Brookings Report is justification for careful social engineering, to prepare the unwashed masses for what is really 'out there.'  However, one could just as easily argue that secret information is a source of power, and that the Brookings Report simply offers justification for the secrecy...plausible deniability, in other words.

In any case, the well-informed individual must place this book alongside the works of other careful and credible researchers who have come to the same conclusions through various lines of investigation.  NASA is but one agency in a political leviathan, in which secrecy and lies are mother's milk.  That the military and CIA have been heavily involved in NASA since its inception should come as no surprise.

Often, it is difficult for many people to articulate the definition of 'they,' and to readily offer up documented examples of how 'they' manipulate and control the masses.  Hoagland and Bara have done a masterful, if somewhat tedious, job of it in a tome dense with information and directions for personal investigation.  It is easy, as many have, to dismiss Hoagland as arrogant and egotistical, but the ad hominem attack only discredits the messenger, not the message.  What comes through strongest in this book is the authors' sense of wonder and excitement, and the deep frustration at being thwarted at every turn in trying to satiate their curiosity.

In the closing pages, the reader is left with the distinct, though often misquoted, feeling that, "The Universe is not only queerer than we imagine, it is queerer than we CAN imagine."

If the authors leave the reader with the desire to add his voice to the chorus of those calling for openess and transparency in the sciences, then one assumes they have been successful.

To The Moon, Alice!

How would you like to enjoy one of the greatest mysteries in the known Universe?

It's possible for you to look directly at it with your own eyes.  You can see it nearly every night of the year.  People write songs and poems about it.  It figures into all of our legends and myths.  And it's one of the most mysterious things we've ever encountered.

Isaac Newton, father of calculus, creator of the Three Laws of Motion, guru of gravity, and the original Apple dude, said that he could explain the motions of the entire known Universe, except for the Moon.  Isaac Asimov, creator of the Three Laws of Robotics and all-around great sci-fi writer, said there was no greater mystery than the Moon.  And with all our super-computers and space telescopes and even having walked around up there, we still can't figure it out.

Bet you thought the Moon was the least of our problems, didn't you?

Just so you know, I have had a deep and abiding interest in astronomy and manned space exploration since I can remember.  I studied astrophysics under Dr. Larry Pinske at the University of Houston and brought home straight As.  So I know a little bit about these things.  I can tell you that all the self-assured statements about where the Moon came from are not worth the hot air they are made with.

The prevailing dogma at the Church of Our Lady of Know-It-All, is that the Moon was formed when an 'extra' Mars crashed into Earth, and the resulting rubble pile coalesced into the Moon, roughly 4 billion years ago.  All fine and good, except no one seems to be able to explain how an 'extra' Mars was flying around loose defying all of Kepler's Laws of Orbital Dynamics.

The idea is that the Earth formed around 4.5 billion years ago, and we get that number because that's the oldest rock we've ever found on Earth.  One teeny-weeny little problem: some of the rocks the astronauts brought back from the Moon are a billion years older than that, AND the dirt they were sitting on is a billion years older than that!  AAANNNDDD, some of the rocks don't match the general composition of the Moon or the Earth, meaning they don't come from either.

"Oh, pshaw," you say, "The astronauts didn't go to the Moon.  It was all faked by Stanley Kubrik at Disney Studios."

Well, remember Dr. Pinke?  He did studies on the astronauts helmets.  There were microscopic pits and spikes inside the helmets made by cosmic rays striking the material.  The astronauts all complained of transient flashes of light INSIDE their eyeballs, which later was confirmed to be cosmic rays striking small particles inside the liquid of the eyes.  Also, a number of the moon-walkers have died of rare cancers.  All of these data points add up to men who have been outside the van Allen radiation belts.

I'm willing to entertain the idea that PARTS of the Moon transmissions were faked by Stanley, though, to cover the times when the astronauts were messing with things we aren't allowed to know about.

There's many other problems, too.

You know those dark areas on the face of the Moon, called maria, right?  Unlike much of the rest of the Moon, they are composed of a titanium alloy, and dead in the center of each one is a nearly-perfectly round, 20-mile deep object called a 'mascon,' or mass concentration.  Absolutely no explanation for those.  They are large enough that if you stood on the edge of Mare Tranquilitus (where Apollo 11 landed) and dropped a plumb-bob, it would stand several degrees off plumb due to the gravitational pull of the mascon.

The astronauts left a bunch of expensive equipment all over the place, among which were seismographs.  They measure, naturally, Moon-quakes.  Just to get some readings, NASA crashed a lot of stuff into the Moon, like left-over craft and rocket parts.  Guess what?  The Moon rings like a bell when you hit it.  One particular instance occured when Apollo 13's third stage hit the Moon, causing it to ring for several hours.

Oh, and it turns out that the Moon is really hard, too.  The astronauts had a hell of a time trying to get core samples.  One, I don't remember who, nearly fell down trying to turn the drill.  Related to that is the fact that none of the Moon's craters are deeper than 3 kilometers, despite being hit with some pretty big 'somethings.'  So, even big pieces of 'space stuff' can't get very deep into the surface.

One of my favorites is that the Moon dust brought back has lots of little iron balls in it.  That's not necessarily weird, but the fact that they don't rust is.  There's also a bunch of elements and compounds that are vanishingly rare on Earth, including iridium and uranium-237.  Sure, we can make it in the lab, but lying around on the ground?  That's a toughie.

In general terms, the Moon is 1/4 the size of Earth, which is pretty damn big, as moons go.  It also happens to be the exact right size and in the exact right orbit to have nearly the exact same apparent size as the Sun, so we get things like solar eclipses.  The chances of that happening completely by random chance are, well, virtually nil.

The Moon is also in a near-perfect circular orbit almost exactly over the Earth's equator, even though the Earth is tilted 23-degrees to the side.  Again, don't bother calculating the odds on that, since most calculators don't have that many places right of the decimal.

Few people remember this, but when the astronauts went to the Moon, there was concern that they would sink in the dust that had accumulated on the surface of the Moon over the billions of years it had sat there.  "Scientists" did all these calculations and came up with the idea that there should be at least a couple of feet of powder on the surface.  Well, guess what?  There was only inches, meaning the Moon was either far younger than anyone thought, or some other force had been in play.

Another interesting tid-bit...when the US and USSR were fighting to be the first to get to the Moon, both sides kept missing.  Their toys either flew off into the Great Unknown, or they smacked into the Moon.  Now, orbital dynamics were pretty well established by Isaac Newton.  In fact, Newton could have orbited the Moon if rocketry had been advanced enough.  So why did all that hardware keep missing?

Werner von Braun let that cat out of the bag in an interview with Life Magazine.  He told us that the Moon's center of gravity was not at the center of the Moon, but quite a bit further out, meaning that the Moon's gravity well started about 5,000 miles sooner than anyone expected.  That can play hell with your trans-orbital insertions, bub.  Interestingly, about two weeks after von Braun let that out, he was 'retired' and all the toys on both sides started getting to the Moon with no problem.  Hmmm...

There's plenty more: transient gas releases from certain craters, water vapor clouds floating around, magnetized rocks on a planet with no magnetic field.  The list goes on.  And here's the problem...none of these things fit any of the theories, or can be explained by any 'natural' means, at least that 'scientists' are willing to entertain at the moment.

The Moon is, in fact, one of the greatest mysteries in physics, astronomy and chemistry.  There's a lot of posturing by 'scientists,' like they've got it all sussed, but in fact they don't have a clue.  The Moon is nothing like the Earth in composition, is much older than Earth by any measurements we have taken, and has characteristics that don't match any other natural phenomenon we have observed to date.  It shouldn't exist is about all anyone can truly conclude, if they are honest and weight the facts, not their personal pipe dreams or the paradigm currently being paid for by grants from the National Science Foundation.

Not to mention that something about the Moon scared the hell out of NASA, and they haven't been back in 40 years.  Don't believe a word of all that 'budget' crap.  For what they've spent on space stations and shuttles and interplanetary robots, they could've built a small city on the Moon with regular tourist runs each month.  Hell, it's only three days away by 60s technology, using computing power that didn't come close to your smart phone today.

The conspiracy theory is not the facts that I have laid out.  NASA has published the information, though they hide it pretty well.  The conspiracy is the truth about the Moon and why humans haven't been back there in 40 years.

It's a great puzzle, a real mystery, in our own back yard.  Some of the greatest minds in history have stubbed their toes on it, and the honest ones have admitted it.  It literally stares us in the face every night, and yet almost no one in the 'establishment' will touch it.  They'd rather send an endless series of rock-sniffing golf carts to Mars and call it a major step in science, than deal with the real head-scratcher slapping us upside the head.

Ain't it about time we started getting some real science, and real answers, for all those billions of dollars we keep shooting into space?  If not, then can't we put that money to better use down here?