A brother in Christ recently spoke with me, informing me that when I began posting this series on the Apollo Moon hoax he thought it absurd to even suggest the Moon landings had been faked. He said that it was only due to his having found so much of my previous teachings and research to be sound that he was inclined to treat my presentation with a degree of seriousness. Now, after much evidence has been presented of the Apollo deception, this man has completely altered his judgment of the matter. He now deems the idea of man having walked on the Moon to be absurd.
This brother in Christ who is in his fifties related to me that from the time of his youth he has been interested in space and entertained ideas of working for the American space program. Between the ages of 8-12 he built Estes model rockets and launched them into the air. I too did the same thing when I was in the 7th grade. The progressive public school I was attending offered an elective course in model rocketry, which I eagerly enrolled in. We would build our model rockets and then take them out to a field adjoining the school where we would launch them. I was into building a wide array of model kits as a youth, and I had rockets, airplanes, and helicopters suspended from the ceiling of my bedroom. I also had a large poster of the Moon on one of my walls. These were some of my most cherished possessions.
The brother with whom I conversed, told me that when he was older he visited NASA’s U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama. One of the things he remembered from his visit was being served an astronaut meal. The meal included “astronaut ice cream” which was reportedly served to the Apollo astronauts. The day following our conversation I was searching out an unrelated matter on the Internet. The site I was visiting had a rotating banner linking an assortment of news headlines. If you are not quick, the banner may change and you will end up clicking on a story you did not intend to access. This is what occurred to me. I was quite surprised when, instead of the news story I intended to view, I was taken to a page featuring a story on “astronaut ice cream.” The story related that astronaut ice cream never existed during the Apollo era. It was nothing more than a sale’s gimmick.
https://www.rt.com/usa/332611-astronaut-ice-cream-hoax/
What a way to destroy childhood innocence! You mean to tell me now that astronaut ice cream was a hoax? Why would NASA perpetuate such a monstrous deception? If astronaut ice cream was fake, then what can we possibly trust to be real in this world?
I am being overly dramatic. However, I do find it fitting that this story of a “minor” deception comes from the U.S. Space and Rocket Center where one can view exhibits on the history of the American space program. They even have a Saturn V rocket on display. The museum visitor would be well served to be provided with a disclaimer before entering this facility.
The more one looks into the Apollo Space Program, the more they discover that the claims of men rocketing to the Moon and returning to Earth are suffering from an erosion of evidence. We have already observed that NASA claims to have lost the high-definition video tapes of the Apollo Moon missions. They also, at the direction of Congress, destroyed all material related to the Saturn V rocket, rendering it impossible to recreate the rocket or examine its designs to see whether it was truly capable of the things NASA claimed it could do. We read of the disappearance of Thomas Barron’s 500 page report on the shortcomings of the Apollo Program, a report he presented to a Congressional special committee. Thomas Barron, his wife, and stepdaughter were found dead at a Florida railroad crossing a few days after he submitted the report. This insured that the missing report could not be re-created.
One of the telltale signs of a deception is disappearing evidence, evidence which could be used to test the veracity of what actually occurred. My aim in this writing is to encourage believers to walk with their eyes opened, being alert to signs of deception and the actions of lying men and women. Such events are encountered all the time. For example, in 2014 Lois Lerner, director of the Internal Revenue Service's Exempt Organizations Unit, was cited for contempt of Congress for her failure to cooperate in the investigation of political malfeasance by the IRS as it targeted Tea Party organizations, subjecting them to harassment and unjust tax rulings. An investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice and Federal Bureau of Investigation, which was completed in 2015, “found no evidence that any IRS official acted based on political, discriminatory, corrupt, or other inappropriate motives that would support a criminal prosecution.”
http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-irs-conservatives-20151023-story.html
The key words to note in the FBI and Justice Department ruling are “found no evidence.” The evidence lay primarily in thousands of e-mails from within the IRS. The e-mails were never made available for Congress to review as Ms. Lerner claimed that the computer hard drive on which they resided had crashed and was subsequently thrown away. I don’t believe she was disappointed at this extremely coincidental event which prevented Congress from examining the evidence.
As hard as it is to conceive of such events occurring even once, they tend to occur quite commonly. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton experienced a similar issue when she became embroiled in the Benghazi scandal. It was discovered that Hillary had opted to keep her official government e-mails on a private server, even e-mails rated top-security, a clear violation of government policy. When Congress wanted to review her e-mails to discover her level of involvement with the events of Benghazi, her departure from government policy was discovered. Rather than turning the server over to Congress and letting them sift through its contents, Hillary Clinton cherry-picked certain documents to share with Congress, while withholding others. Clinton turned over 30,490 messages that she and her team deemed to be work-related. Clinton and her staff said they destroyed 31,830 messages which they determined to be personal. The private server was then subsequently wiped clean. Whoops! There goes the evidence.
“You mean wiped, like with a cloth?”
Yes, Hillary actually asked that question, feigning ignorance of what it means to “wipe” a computer hard drive. There is a term used for such deceptive actions. It is “cover-up.” Cover-ups occur all the time. Evidence disappears. Whistle-blowers are silenced. Lies and obfuscation are the order of the day. We live in a very dark world. If lying and bearing false witness were not such a common transgression of fallen man, Yahweh would not have prohibited them in the Ten Commandments.
One of the main pieces of evidence people cite in defense of the official government narrative of the Apollo Moon landings are the lunar rocks returned from the surface of the Moon. In 1969, immediately following the Apollo 11 Mission, the U.S. government presented Moon rocks to the heads of state of 135 nations and states. These were distributed as souvenirs, and were not intended for scientific research. Rendering these Moon rocks unusable for scientific testing, they were each encased in Lucite, a clear plastic substance.
Moon Rock from Apollo 16
A brick sized Moon rock was again broken up and sent to heads of state around the world after the final Moon mission, Apollo 17. In all 270 Goodwill Moon Rocks were distributed. The whereabouts of these Moon rocks has only recently begun to be tracked. In 1998, a sting operation initiated and led by NASA’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) began, ostensibly to catch individuals who were scamming people, mainly the elderly, by selling them bogus Moon rocks. I guess NASA doesn’t like competition. This sting operation was dubbed Operation Lunar Eclipse. The man heading up Operation Lunar Eclipse for NASA was Joseph Gutheinz. The sting operation caught many bogus sellers of Moon rocks, while reportedly recovering one of the authentic Moon rocks gifted to heads of state. This was the Goodwill Moon Rock presented to Honduras. Some individuals were seeking to sell it for $5 million dollars which was deemed to be fair market value.
In 2002, Joseph Gutheinz, who was then serving as a professor of criminal justice at the University of Phoenix in Arizona, challenged his graduate students to locate all of the Goodwill Moon Rocks from Apollo 11 and 17. Since then hundreds of graduate students have participated in the Moon Rock Project. One of the first discoveries by Gutheinz’s students occurred in 2002 when they reported that Cyprus’ two Moon rocks were missing. The students have not yet ascertained the location and ownership of all 270 Goodwill Moon Rocks, but what they have found so far is not favorable. They have determined that 180 of the Goodwill Moon Rocks are missing. That is a full 2/3rds of the Moon rocks gifted to the public. One might expect a handful of Moon rocks to be lost over time, but to discover that the vast majority of them are missing is extraordinary.
The image below shows how the Goodwill Moon Rock presentations appeared. As you can see, it would be a difficult item to simply misplace. The displays included the flag of the nation, or state, with a Lucite ball containing the Moon rock fragments mounted to the surface.
Typical Goodwill Moon Rock Display
These presentations were clearly pre-planned by NASA, and were not a spontaneous gift initiated by the American President as many suggest. The small flags incorporated into these displays were allegedly carried by the Apollo astronauts to the Moon. Such an act speaks of pre-planning, and as we shall see, NASA also used foresight in obtaining suitable rocks to be used in these displays. A Wikipedia article titled Stolen and Missing Moon Rocks, provides a partial listing of the results of the investigation of the University of Phoenix students. Following are a few examples.
Ireland
The Apollo 11 rock presented to Ireland was accidentally discarded in a landfill known as the Dunsink Landfill in October 1977 following a fire that consumed the Meridian room library at the Dublin Dunsink Observatory where the rock was displayed...
Malta
On May 18, 2004, Malta’s Goodwill Moon Rock was stolen from Malta’s Museum of Natural History in Mdina. According to an Associated Press story appearing in USA Today “there are no surveillance cameras and no custodians at the Museum of Natural History because of insufficient funding. The only attendant is the ticket-seller...” “A Maltese flag displayed next to the rock - which the U.S. astronauts had taken up with them - was not taken...” Malta’s Goodwill Moon Rock has never been recovered and continues to be actively pursued.
Romania
University of Phoenix graduate students uncovered evidence that the Romania Goodwill Moon Rock may have been auctioned off by the estate of its executed former leader, Nicolae Ceausescu. Both Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife, Elena Ceausescu, were executed by firing squad on December 25, 1989, for the crime of genocide...
Spain
Evidence surfaced that both Spain’s Apollo 11 Moon Rock and Apollo 17 Goodwill Moon Rock which were given to General Francisco Franco’s Administration by the Nixon Administration were missing. Pablo Jáuregui, the Science Editor of El Mundo, a Spanish newspaper, disclosed in a July 20, 2009 story entitled: "Franco's grandson: My mother lost Moon stone given her by Grandfather..."
[Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stolen_and_missing_moon_rocks]
NASA claims to have brought back a total of 847 pounds of Moon rocks and lunar soil during the Apollo missions, the result of 2,415 samples removed from the lunar surface. Very little of this has ever been accessible to the public. Of the 135 Goodwill Moon Rocks gifted to heads of state from the Apollo 11 Mission, the location of less than a dozen are known. Of the same number gifted from Apollo 17, only about 25 are accounted for. According to an article from Space.com, the situation is far worse than this, however.
NASA Has Lost Hundreds of Its Moon Rocks, New Report Says
By Denise Chow, SPACE.com Staff Writer, December 9, 2011
NASA has lost or misplaced more than 500 of the moon rocks its Apollo astronauts collected and brought back to Earth, according to a new agency report.
In an audit released Thursday (Dec. 8), NASA's Office of Inspector General states that the agency “lacks sufficient controls over its loans of moon rocks and other astromaterials, which increases the risk that these unique resources may be lost.”
The report stresses the importance of maintaining stricter guidelines for the release of lunar materials to researchers, and more meticulous inventory procedures for their storage and return.
“NASA has been experiencing loss of astromaterials since lunar samples were first returned by Apollo missions,” inspector general Paul K. Martin detailed in the report. “In addition to the Mount Cuba disk, NASA confirmed that 516 other loaned astromaterials have been lost or stolen between 1970 and June 2010, including 18 lunar samples reported lost by a researcher in 2010 and 218 lunar and meteorite samples stolen from a researcher at [NASA's Johnson Space Center] in 2002, but since recovered.”
And while the agency reported the 517 missing moon rock samples, even more of these precious materials may have gone astray, according to the report...
Martin's office audited 59 researchers who had received samples from NASA, and found that 11 of them, or 19 percent, could not locate all of the borrowed materials.
The report also found that the Astromaterials Acquisition and Curation Office at the Johnson Space Center in Houston had records of hundreds of samples that no longer exist, and loans to 12 researchers who had died, retired or relocated, sometimes without the office's knowledge and without returning the samples.
[Source: http://www.space.com/13878-nasa-apollo-moon-rocks-misplaced-lost-report.html]
The monetary value of these losses is significant. NASA has never sold any of their Moon rocks, but if the price of $5 million dollars for the Honduras Goodwill rocks is considered a fair market price, then the total value of the rocks NASA has lost track of would amount to hundreds of millions of dollars. In the year 2000 Russia sold three seed-sized pieces of the Moon they claimed to have brought back to Earth by a robotic probe launched in 1970. These three tiny pieces of Moon rock were sold at auction for $442,500. In another article on the Space.com website it is stated “While the moon rocks recovered by the Apollo astronauts are considered National Treasures and have never been awarded to individuals, hypothetical appraisals have suggested even a 1-gram sample could be worth millions.”
NASA’s loans of lunar rocks and soil to researchers and educational presenters may be compared to the loan of famous paintings between art galleries and museums. The values of the material are similar. When works of art are loaned, they are carefully inspected, catalogued, insured, and secured under strict requirements stipulated by the insurers. NASA, on the other hand, has behaved as if they were simply loaning a bunch of rocks they picked up along the side of the road. This may not be far from the truth.
A 2009 disclosure from the Dutch Rijksmuseum may explain why the disappearance of these “national treasures” may not be too concerning to NASA, and may in fact be deemed to be fortuitous. Following is the account given at the PhysOrg.com website.
Moon Rock Turns Out to be Fake
The Dutch national Rijksmuseum made an embarrassing announcement last week that one of its most loved possessions, a moon rock, is a fake -- just an old piece of petrified wood that's never been anywhere near the moon.
The Rijksmuseum is famous for its fine art collections, especially paintings by Rembrandt and other masters. One of its lesser known objects, the "moon rock," was first unveiled in October 2006 as the centerpiece of a "Fly me to the moon" exhibition. At that time, the museum said the rock symbolized the "exploration of the unknown, colonization of far-away places and bringing back of treasures..." A reading about the "moon rock" was even held on October 7 because it was a full moon!
The rock was given as a private gift to former prime minister Willem Drees Jr in 1969 by the U.S. ambassador to The Netherlands, J. William Middendorf II, during a visit by the Apollo 11 astronauts, Armstrong, Collins and Aldrin, soon after the first moon landing...
When Drees died in 1988, the rock was donated to the Rijksmuseum, where it has remained ever since. According to a museum spokeswoman, Ms Van Gelder, no one doubted the authenticity of the rock because it was in the prime minister's own collection, and they had vetted the acquisition by a phone call to NASA.
According to an article published by the Rijksmuseum, at one time the rock was insured for approximately half a million dollars, but its actual value is probably no more than around $70...
Researchers from the Free University of Amsterdam immediately doubted the rock was from the moon, and began extensive testing. The tests concluded the rock was petrified wood. U.S. embassy officials were unable to explain the findings, but are investigating.
Even though the tests found the piece is not of lunar origin, the Rijksmuseum curators say they will keep it anyway as a curiosity.
[Source: http://phys.org/news/2009-09-moon-fake.html]
An NBC report on the same event added the further detail that the petrified wood was likely from the state of Arizona. Among the statements worth noting in this event include the disclosure that NASA vetted this gift when it was presented to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. In other words, NASA verified that they had given an authentic Moon rock to former Dutch Prime Minister Willem Drees, Jr.. Some questions remain to be answered. Who doctored this piece of petrified wood to make it appear like a Moon rock? Why would NASA engage in a deception like this? The last question is easy to answer if one disbelieves the story of NASA having sent men to the Moon and back. NASA, of course, insists that other Moon rocks which they have gifted to people and nations are authentic.
Some comic relief might be obtained when one considers that a prestigious Dutch museum hosted a special exhibition, billing it as an “exploration of the unknown, colonization of far-away places and bringing back of treasures.” Yet the great treasure they had on display was a piece of petrified wood from the not-so-remote state of Arizona. Maybe the exhibition will inspire some Dutchmen to explore and colonize the American Southwest. I am reminded of similar frauds, or mistakes, perpetrated by scientists of anthropology.
A renowned archaeologist who was the overseer of a museum in Chicago which contained many exhibits relating to the evolution of man and early life on earth, stated, “The depictions of evolutionary progress are limited only by the imagination of the theorist and the gullibility of the hearers.” This was a remarkably candid statement from a man who was a professed evolutionist.
I did quite a bit of research into evolutionary claims when I was in my twenties. I found much deception present. A classic example is Nebraska Man. In 1922 a single molar tooth was unearthed in Nebraska. Professor Henry Osborn, the head of the Department of Paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History, claimed that the tooth belonged to an early hominid (an ancestor of modern man). From this one tooth, an artist’s depiction was drawn up of what this early man looked like. The illustration was published in the Illustrated London News. The reconstruction was described as “the expression of an artist's brilliant imaginative genius.”
In my research I discovered that the depictions of prehistoric man are based upon very little evidence. A tooth, a fragment of a jawbone, or a piece of skull, may be all that the archaeologist discovered. The entire body of the alleged prehistoric man is reconstructed from a fragment. From a tooth, the scientists come up with an idea of what the jaw might have looked like. From the jawbone, they then hypothesize about what the other cranial features might have been. From their conjecture of the skull, they then postulate about what the rest of the bodily frame and structure must have resembled. In the case of Nebraska Man, all this was done from one tooth.
Nebraska Man
Six years after the tooth was found, it was discovered that it actually belonged to an extinct pig. The reconstruction may have been hailed as “brilliant” and “genius,” but in hindsight it was hardly worthy of such accolades. The drawing which appeared in Illustrated London News does not look like any pig I have ever seen. Truly, much that is passed off as truth, whether originating among the scientific community, or outside of it, is limited only by the imagination of the theorist and the gullibility of the hearers.
A point I would make is that of all those who attended this exhibition at the Dutch Rijksmuseum, I am confident the vast majority who looked upon this piece of Arizona petrified wood saw in it a rock plucked from the surface of the Moon. People tend to believe what the authorities and specialists tell them. If you show them a pig’s tooth and say it belonged to a prehistoric man, they are quite willing to believe. So too do men accept it at face value when they are shown a rock from the Earth and told it is a rock from the Moon.
There is a famous adage which states, “You can fool some of the people all of the time; you can fool all of the people some of the time, but you can never fool all of the people all of the time.” NASA would have to do better than passing off petrified wood as Moon rocks if they were to fool all of the people, especially those in the scientific community. NASA has allowed researchers to conduct studies on some of the rocks they claim were returned from the Moon. If they gave researchers pieces of petrified wood, or volcanic pumice, the ruse would soon be discovered. Consequently, I believe NASA has in their inventory of Moon materials rocks which are extra-terrestrial, though I do not believe the Apollo astronauts picked them up while standing on the surface of the Moon. I am persuaded that NASA resorted to other means to obtain a supply of extra-terrestrial material to present to the scientific community in the wake of the Apollo Missions. The obvious choice for such material are Earth-impacting meteorites.
If my guess is correct, I believe NASA’s new emphasis on enacting stricter control of Moon samples is an act of damage control in the wake of increased scrutiny of their achievements from the Apollo Program. With the advent of the Internet, and a growing awareness of evidence of government fakery, NASA is seeking to repossess samples which could result in further embarrassment, like that which they suffered when Dutch scientists proved the rock in the Rijksmuseum was in actuality a piece of petrified wood.
Moon Rock from Apollo 14
One might also ask why NASA would initiate a program such as Operation Lunar Eclipse. NASA is not a law enforcement agency. Surely the FBI, or local law enforcement agencies, could handle the trade in bogus Moon rocks. So why commit NASA’s limited resources to prevent elderly Americans from being scammed? I am not convinced of NASA’s altruism. Rather, I believe it is part of their program to prevent the lunar samples they gifted during the Apollo years from being sold to private parties who might subject them to scientific scrutiny. They in fact accomplished this when they recovered the Goodwill Moon Rocks gifted to the people of Honduras. Why should NASA care, unless they were eager to keep these historic gifts from being scrutinized too closely? I would not be surprised to learn that NASA has had a hand in the removal of these historic gifts from the public. Having served their purpose back in the 1960s and 1970s, there is no benefit to NASA in allowing their own bogus Moon rocks to remain in the hands of the public. They have a strong motive to remove these Moon rocks from the public domain, a feat which is certainly being accomplished as 2/3rds of the Goodwill Moon Rocks can no longer be accounted for.
In order for NASA to fake the Moon landings, one thing they would have to do in advance is prepare samples of the lunar soil and rocks which could be passed off as authentic. The samples to be given as goodwill gifts and encased in Lucite need not be of the same quality as those which would be presented to scientists for study. Whereas NASA may have passed off petrified wood as a Moon rock to those who would treat it as a souvenir, they would have to go to far greater lengths to deceive the scientific community.
This leads to another anomalous detail of the NASA Apollo Program. During the Antarctic Summer of 1966/1967, when development of the Apollo program would have been at fever pitch, with everyone working extended hours to fulfill President Kennedy’s goal of setting a man on the Moon before the decade was out, NASA inexplicably sent a number of their top managers on a trip to Antarctica. Following is an excerpt from the August 8, 2007 Wikipedia entry on Wernher Von Braun. I had to access this quotation from the Internet archive website Wayback Machine, because Wikipedia has since altered the article on Wernher Von Braun, and the key statement underlined can no longer be found there.
During the local summer of 1966/67, von Braun participated in a U.S. government expedition to Antarctica. The expedition was one of the first to systematically search the ice surface for meteorites believed to originate from the moon, for later use as a reference material.
[Wikipedia, August 8, 2007 Entry on Wayback Machine Archives]
This same statement can be found at the website of the New World Encyclopedia under their entry on Wernher Von Braun.
http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Wernher_von_Braun
Here is how the Wikipedia article appears today. Note that all reference to a systematic search for meteorites has been scrubbed from the article.
During the local summer of 1966–67, von Braun participated in a field trip to Antarctica, organized for him and several other members of top NASA management. The goal of the field trip was to determine whether the experience gained by US scientific and technological community during the exploration of Antarctic wastelands would be useful for the manned exploration of space.
[Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernher_von_Braun]
The only source referenced in the Wikipedia article is a May 1967 magazine article in Popular Science. The article is titled A Space Man’s Look at Antarctica, written by Wernher Von Braun. This article which relates the trip of a handful of NASA top administrators to Antarctica can be viewed at no cost in the Popular Science archives.
This article lists a number of goals for the trip taken by the NASA administrators. Among the goals listed are the following. To determine if Antarctica could be used as a suitable testing and training ground for Moon, Mars, and other space explorations. To determine if it would be a suitable location to test surface vehicles such as the Lunar Rover. To determine if it would be suitable for testing of drills and sample collection. To verify whether Antarctica would be suitable for testing of astronaut space suits, etc..
It should be noted that NASA did not perform any testing or training of Apollo astronauts in Antarctica, and it is an anomaly for these top NASA managers to set aside their very important and time sensitive projects to make what was an unfruitful, expensive, fact-finding trip to the South Pole. Those who made the trip along with Dr. Wernher Von Braun were Dr. Robert Gilruth, Director of the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston, Dr. Maxime Faget, Houston’s Director of Engineering and Development, and Dr. Ernst Stuhlinger, head of the Research Project Laboratory at the Marshall Space Flight Center.
The map above, copied from the Popular Science article, shows some of the locations the NASA administrators visited. Were the reasons for the visit listed in the Popular Science article merely a cover for other NASA activities? Was the trip’s true purpose to organize the collection of a sufficient supply of meteorites to be used in the place of Moon rocks, since the astronauts would not actually be going to the Moon? A strong argument can be made to support such a conclusion. We can start by recognizing that Antarctica is the best location in the world for collecting meteorites.
Why Antarctica?
Antarctica is the world’s premier meteorite hunting-ground for two reasons. Although meteorites fall in a random fashion all over the globe, the likelihood of finding a meteorite is enhanced if the background material is plain and the accumulation rate of indigenous sediment is low. Consequently the East Antarctic icesheet, a desert of ice, provides an ideal background for meteorite recovery- go to the right place, and any rock you find must have fallen from the sky. This allows the recovery of meteorites without bias toward types that look most different from earth rocks (a problem on the inhabited continents) and without bias toward larger sizes.
But another factor may be equally important. As the East Antarctic ice sheet flows toward the margins of the continent, its progress is occasionally blocked by mountains or obstructions below the surface of the ice. In these areas, old deep ice is pushed to the surface and can become stagnant, with very little outflow and consistent, slow inflow... Over significant stretches of time (tens of thousands of years) phenomenal concentrations of meteorites can develop, as high as 1 per square meter in some locations.
[Source: http://caslabs.case.edu/ansmet/faqs/]
ANSMET Personnel Searching for Meteorites in Antarctica
Since 1975, the organization called ANSMET (The Antarctic Search For Meteorites), has sent personnel to collect meteorites during the Antarctic Summer, each mission lasting approximately 6 weeks. As of 2015, ANSMET has collected approximately 21,000 meteorites, the largest of which weighed approximately 60 pounds. They annually bring back an average of 550 meteorites collected by a small team of 8-13 people. Among the meteorites collected are lunaites, which are meteorites determined to have been blasted to Earth during asteroid collisions on the Moon.
Who funds ANSMET, and who receives their meteorites? The answer in both cases is NASA.
How is ANSMET supported?
The Antarctic Search for Meteorites program (ANSMET) is a US government-supported activity; simply put, it is supported by you, the taxpayer. Funding for annual fieldwork is supported by competed grants awarded to Case Western Reserve University from NASA while curation and characterization work is supported by a partnership between NASA and the Smithsonian Institution. ANSMET has been continuously funded since 1976. Currently ANSMET support comes from NASA’s Near Earth Object program, with funding through the 2016-2017 season. That makes us part of the Planetary Defence Community.
How are ANSMET meteorites distributed? Who owns them?
After each field season the newly recovered specimens are shipped (still frozen) to the Antarctic Meteorite laboratory at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston Texas.
[Source: http://caslabs.case.edu/ansmet/faqs/]
It should be noted that Johnson Space Center is the location of NASA’s Lunar Processing Laboratory where all lunar material acquired from the Apollo missions was taken to be processed and stored. It is certainly within the realm of possibility for NASA to pass off meteorites gathered from Antarctica as rocks collected by astronauts on the surface of the Moon. Although ANSMET is officially recognized as having its start in 1975, three years after the end of the Apollo Program, there is good reason NASA would have wanted to keep their meteorite gathering activities in Antarctica hidden from the public until after the Moon missions had ended. I would contend that Wernher Von Braun and the other NASA managers who went with him to Antarctica in1966/1967, did so to initiate this program of asteroid collection. They did so just in time to have a sufficient supply on hand when the first astronauts reportedly returned from the Moon in July 1969.
A 50 lb. Meteorite Collected by ANSMET
Just like rocks collected on the Moon, these meteorites have been subjected to space radiation, and share the same characteristics as one would expect from a Moon rock. When subjected to scientific testing, they are demonstrated to be extra-terrestrial in origin. Why did NASA send administrators to Antarctica in December and January of 1966/1967? It was a lot easier to collect space rocks there than it was to collect them on the surface of the Moon. The following statement can be found on ANSMET’s website.
ANSMET has been called “the poor person’s space mission” because we recover materials from other solar system bodies at a fraction of the cost required by other methods. The cost of ANSMET fieldwork over its entire history still amounts to much less than 1% of a typical sample return mission.
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