Lunacy & The Age of Deception - Chapter 19

The Anomalous Behavior of the Apollo Space Program

One way to detect a deception or lie is to observe the behavior of the people who are knowledgeable participants in it. Liars frequently behave in ways which are contradictory to the actions of those who are telling the truth. Being observant of these “tells” can be one of the best indicators that a person is being dishonest.

For example, the body language and speech of the three Apollo 11 astronauts at their official news conference as they fielded questions from reporters was not what one would expect from men who had just accomplished the greatest feat of exploration in human history. Rather than being ecstatically enthusiastic, the men appeared tentative, embarrassed, and uncomfortable during the press conference. They frankly looked like men who were ashamed of something, worried that they would be discovered to be quite the opposite of heroes.

One of the most famous names associated with the Apollo Moon Missions is Neil Armstrong. He is reportedly the first man to set foot on the Moon. That would be a stellar achievement if true, and any normal man would seek to capitalize on that fame by remaining in the public eye and acquiescing to the many requests to do interviews. Yet Neil Armstrong did just the opposite after the Moon landing. He became reclusive, inaccessible, only on rare occasions granting interviews on this subject. Neil Armstrong’s aversion to speaking publicly about the Apollo 11 Mission was so well known that when he finally granted an interview 43 years later, the ABC news commentator in speaking of Armstrong’s interview expressed surprise. However, it was not ABC to whom Armstrong granted an interview. It was Alex Malley, the head of an accounting agency, who for several years hosted a program titled The Bottom Line for Nine Network in Australia.

In a one minute clip on ABC News, the commentator states the following.

The first man to step foot on the Moon is finally opening up, sharing some personal thoughts about that historic day, because until now, Neil Armstrong, now 81, has been pretty quiet about that walk. So, it caught a lot of people by surprise when he talked candidly in front of a group of Australian accountants that he was surprised that Apollo 11 actually worked because there were so many unknowns about making a lunar flight.
[Source: http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/neil-armstrong-rare-interview-frustrated-nasa-lacks-direction/story?id=16423267]

This rare interview would also be the last of Neil Armstrong’s life, for he died not long afterwards. Some weeks back a reader wrote to share the following with me.

Back in the early 80's I was a demonstration pilot for Gates Learjet based in Tucson, AZ. Neil Armstrong was on the board of directors at that time. I was given an assignment to fly a Learjet from Tucson to Ohio to pick up Mr. Armstrong and fly him back to Tucson for an important board meeting. I was briefed by my boss not to discuss his moon landing. No questions period. I thought that was very odd. Neil was a nice guy but very quiet. I spoke with other Learjet captains that had spent lots of time flying with him and they said the same thing. The moon landing was never discussed. It was off limits.

If the Apollo 11 Mission achieved the goals that NASA and the American government have claimed, why did the first man to set foot on the surface of another planetary body avoid talking about it for the rest of his life? Nor was Neil Armstrong the only member of the Apollo 11 crew to exhibit signs of a troubled psyche when it came to discussing their accomplishments in public. In a July 8, 2009 article in the UK’s The Telegraph newspaper, a most unusual piece was written on the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Mission. Following is an excerpt.

Buzz Aldrin: the dark times that followed that historic flight
By Marc Lee

A few minutes into our conversation, Buzz Aldrin makes it clear that we won't be spending much time reliving the day that began a new chapter in the history of the human race and made him one of the most famous people on – and off – the planet. It's not that the Second Man on the Moon doesn't want to talk about his space odyssey; it's just that he thinks he should be suitably rewarded for doing so.

Sharing his extraterrestrial experiences is, he concedes, "an appropriate and necessary thing: it's what people want. But I can't just keep doing that for ever in my life [he's 79] unless I'm appropriately compensated."

So, is he reluctant to talk about Apollo 11? "No, I wouldn't say I'm reluctant, but my [interest] is not in the past…" And he proceeds to roll out a diversionary anecdote about how, when he was young, his father would reminisce endlessly about the early days of aviation and how "regrettable" that was. He is and always has been, he says, "future-oriented."

Surprisingly, Aldrin's reservations about describing what it's like to kick up moon dust for an hour and a half, as he did on July 20, 1969, are in marked contrast to his willingness to discuss – free of charge – the dark side of his life: his struggles with depression and alcoholism, his two failed marriages, his difficult relationship with his father, and the tragedy of his mother (born Marion Moon), who killed herself shortly before the lunar mission because she did not think she could handle her son's imminent fame.

And, while refusing to elaborate on his celebrated description of the Moon's "magnificent desolation" – the title of his new autobiography – he is happy to talk about the man who accompanied him on his incredible journey. Not that happy is quite the word to describe his relationship with Neil Armstrong – now or 40 years ago.

Is he still in touch with Armstrong or Michael Collins, the third crew member, who stayed in lunar orbit? "Well," he says, not quite answering the question, "they have personalities that are different, each one, and they're different than mine. We worked together as a very close team, not jocular but very seriously determined to carry out [the task] we were given."

So it was a professional relationship? "Absolutely professional, yes."

And it didn't continue after Apollo 11? "Not that much. Hardly at all."

He sees Armstrong very rarely: the last time was at Nasa's 50th anniversary celebrations in 2008. "I was expected to be there," he says, adding in passing an observation that throws a revealing light on their relationship: "No one mentioned that I was there."

Did they chat? "Not really." There was no conversation? "Not particularly."

Having shared with Armstrong such a wondrous, perilous, unprecedented adventure – one that redrew the boundaries of human experience – does it sadden Aldrin that there is no longer a bond between them, if indeed there ever was one?

"I'd rather it be otherwise, yeah. It just doesn't seem proper any more for me to ask him to come to things I'm involved in. And he doesn't ask me. He doesn't let me know what he's doing..."

After Apollo 11, the 39-year-old Aldrin found it difficult to readjust to life on Earth. His marriage of 21 years soon broke up, he remarried in haste and was divorced for a second time within two years. His military career ended after an unhappy stint as commandant of the USAF test-pilot school. (He had been a fighter pilot, with 66 combat missions over Korea in the early Fifties, but never a test pilot.) He began to suffer acutely from depression, and finally confronted the fact that he was an alcoholic.
[Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/space/5779145/Buzz-Aldrin-the-dark-times-that-followed-that-historic-flight.html]

What this article doesn’t share is that Buzz Aldrin found it very difficult to embrace the public relations role that NASA demanded of him after the Apollo 11 Mission. This led to a nervous breakdown which resulted in Aldrin requesting that the military provide him with psychiatric help. They complied, and Aldrin was admitted to Wilford Hall in 1972 for 4 weeks of treatment. Wilford Hall is an Air Force medical treatment facility with a psychiatric department.

All of these events are anomalous, being quite the opposite of what one might expect from a national hero who had achieved one of the most extraordinary goals a man could strive for. A crew of men working together in extremely hazardous conditions in pursuit of a common goal should have experienced a great bonding and a mutual and shared pride of accomplishment. One often observes reunions of men who served in combat together, for the stress, camaraderie, and experience of watching one another’s back, brings men closer together than almost any other experience can. Reunions of war buddies occur many decades after the original events, and are frequently only ended when death occurs. It is anomalous that these three astronauts of Apollo 11, who reportedly faced such great dangers and achieved an unprecedented milestone in human history, fell out of contact with one another and manifest none of the bonding one would expect. Their behavior is more akin to men who share a secret shame.

It is understandable, however, when one knows the truth, why Aldrin and Armstrong did not remain close. After his initial difficulties in being in the public eye and experiencing so much disintegration in his personal life, Buzz Aldrin took a very different path to that of Neil Armstrong. Whereas Armstrong avoided being in the public eye and seeking to capitalize on the Apollo mythos, Buzz Aldrin became more of a flamboyant merchandiser of his fame. It was as if in recognizing that he would have to perpetuate the lie the rest of his life, he decided that he might as well make some money off of it.

Buzz Aldrin in his 80s

Aldrin is fond of wearing jewelry, as demonstrated in the image above. He has numerous rings and bracelets. He also is fond of wearing NASA and spaceflight themed hats and t-shirts. The Walt Disney Company, which played such a key role in building up the Moon program during the Apollo era, has continued to play the role of propagandist. In their hit animated film Toy Story and its successors, one of the main characters is named Buzz Lightyear, a not-so-subtle allusion to Buzz Aldrin.

Buzz and Buzz

For those who care to ponder the cunning way in which Hollywood communicates messages through movies, the catch phrase of Buzz Lightyear is “To infinity and beyond.” This is a subtle alteration of a title card which appeared at the beginning of the fourth act of Stanley Kubrick’s movie 2001, A Space Odyssey bearing the phrase “Beyond the Infinite.”

When one considers Stanley Kubrick’s role in directing the faked Apollo 11 mission, a subject we previously examined in Kubrick’s disclosure of this fact in his movie The Shining, the associations between the Toy Story movies, their characters, and actual events come to light. Buzz Lightyear is first introduced in Toy Story as a deceived toy space ranger who thinks he can actually fly. The subtle allusions to Buzz Aldrin and his crewmates is thinly disguised, for they too pretend to be able to fly to places which are beyond the realm of their actual ability. There are many more connections made in these animated Disney movies. It is as if Disney is mocking the gullibility of Americans who have believed that the Apollo missions were real.

Buzz Lightyear in Toy Story 3

Do you see a similarity between the carpet on which Buzz Lightyear is standing and the carpet where we saw the Apollo 11 launch simulated in The Shining?

Apollo 11 Launch

In this additional image from Toy Story 3, we see a security camera with “Overlook 237” written on its side. The movie The Shining took place at the Overlook Hotel, and room 237 signified the “Moon Room.” The powers-that-be which control global media, have often used subtlety in ways which appear to mock the intelligence of the masses. As we previously observed in the National Geographic article on Apollo 8 which was titled A Most Fantastic Voyage, and their later article on The Incredible Story of Apollo 11, the media has covertly been declaring the Apollo program to be a fiction, yet the people have not perceived the message.

The Apollo 11 astronauts did not behave as the space conquerors the Apollo mythology made them out to be. I wonder even if the selection of a name from mythology to identify the Moon program (as well as other NASA programs) is not intended as a sly means of announcing that NASA is creating myths, rather than reality. In researching the Moon landing hoax I have come across numerous instances where Apollo astronauts, their wives, or associated individuals, have expressed themselves in ways that carry a double entendre. For example, during Apollo 8, the first mission to take men into orbit around the Moon, James Lovell described what he was observing with the following words.

The Moon is essentially grey, no color; looks like plaster of Paris or sort of a grayish beach sand.

Plaster of Paris and beach sand may well have been used to create a model of the Moon which was used to fake the Apollo 8 Mission. In Associated Press articles in newspapers around the world announcing man setting foot on the Moon in July of 1969, we find the following words.

It’s Unbelievably Perfect

The article above shows Neil Armstrong’s wife Jan who also stated, “I can't believe it is really happening.” People not only cross their fingers for good luck, but they cross their fingers when they are lying. Buzz Aldrin’s wife is also quoted as saying, “It seems like a dramatic TV show, but it seems unreal.”

Following is an UPI article printed in The Times - News of Hendersonville, North Carolina on July 21, 1969.

Wives of Astronauts ‘Couldn’t Believe It’

The wives of the Apollo 11 astronauts couldn’t believe it, either.

“I can’t believe it’s really happening,” said Mrs. Jan Armstrong after she saw her husband Neil walking on the moon. Mrs. Joan Aldrin called it “unreal” and Mrs. Pat Collins “marvelous, fantastic...”

“It’s fantastic,” Jan Armstrong, a pretty, trim woman with gray streaking her dark hair, told newsmen. “And I’m just as excited as you all are...”

“The evening has been unbelievably perfect,” Mrs. Armstrong said...

Mrs. Aldrin hugged her father, Michael Archer, when the Eagle lunar vehicle was safely down.

“It was hard to think it was real until the men actually moved,” she said of the live television pictures of her husband and Armstrong moving through the shadows of their spacecraft on the Moon.

“I felt like I was looking at another simulation.”

Pat Collins - her green eyes set off by a chartreuse dress - met the press after the landing and said, “I thought it was positively beautiful.”

Are you detecting a pattern here? How do you get Americans with the Christian morals of the middle class of the 1960s to take part in a deception without asking them to tell outright lies? You persuade them that it is not really lying if they state the truth in such a way that people understand it to mean just the opposite. The deception is just as much present, but these individuals can console themselves with the thought that they did not tell outright lies. Can’t you hear them now?

“I said I couldn’t believe it was really happening. I said it was ‘unreal’ and ‘fantastic.’”

“Me too. I told the reporters that what I saw was ‘unbelievably perfect.’”

“Oh yes, I also told the reporters that I felt like I was watching another simulation. I cannot help it if they misconstrued my words to mean something other than what I said.”

Aside from the anomalous behavior of the astronauts and their wives, the space program itself has been full of contradictions. It has not performed as one would expect a normal technology program to behave. Its history defies normal patterns of technological development and maturation. Consider the following.

Since the last Apollo Mission in 1972 when men reportedly traveled 240,000 miles from the surface of the Earth, no manned mission has gone more than 600 miles from Earth, and the majority of missions have gone no more than 200 miles from the Earth’s surface. If men had actually gone to the Moon, this would certainly appear to be a great anomaly. When one considers the tremendous advances in technology which have occurred in the past 44 years, it is difficult to conceive that men have ventured no further than 1/1000th of the distance they had achieved more than 4 decades ago.

To put this in perspective let us compare the history of manned space flight to the technological progress of the airplane. The first claimed manned space flight occurred on April 12, 1961 when Soviet Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin made a single orbit of the Earth at an altitude of 91 miles which lasted for 108 minutes. 8 years later, NASA reportedly sent men all the way to the Moon, where they disembarked their space craft, walked about on the Moon, collected samples, planted a flag, held a phone call with the American President, spent 22 hours on the lunar surface, and then blasted off and returned to Earth, having spent a total of 8 days in space.

The first powered flight of man in an airplane occurred on December 17, 1903. The longest flight by the Wright brother’s that day was 852 feet and lasted 59 seconds. If we go forward 8 years, the span of time from Yuri Gagarin’s initial orbit of the Earth until Apollo 11, we find that airplane development had made steady, if not spectacular, progress. Newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst offered $50,000 to the first person who could fly across the United States coast to coast within a 30 day time period. A man by the name of Calbraith Perry Rodgers sought to fulfill the challenge and collect the prize. He was the first man to fly coast to coast, and the year was 1911. However, Rodgers had to stop 70 times, not all of them scheduled, and he hired the Wright brother’s mechanic at a cost of $70 per week to keep the plane flying. The mechanic would travel by train and meet Rodgers at each stop. Rodgers failed to meet the 30 day deadline, for it took him 49 days to fly coast to coast in a Wright Model EX airplane. He could have traveled the same distance quicker by train.

This slow, but steady progress in airplane design is what one might expect in the development of a new technology. Like rocket development, airplane evolution was dangerous. In 1910 the Wright brothers formed a nine man demonstration flying team to help sell airplanes. They would perform at exhibitions. The team was only together for one year, during which two of the pilots died in crashes. After disbanding, four other pilots from the original nine would die in airplane accidents. Calbraith Rodgers also died in a plane crash a year after flying coast to coast across America.

In the year 1927, Charles Lindbergh would fly non-stop across the Atlantic Ocean, from New York to France. During the 1940s, in the midst of World War II, jet airplanes were first flown. In the year 1955, 44 years after Rodgers made the first slow and halting airplane trip across the United States, Boeing introduced the Dash-80, the precursor to the 707. The Dash-80 had a cruising speed of 550 mph, and a range of 3,530 miles. It could fly coast to coast on a single tank of gas, and in a time of 6 hours as compared to the 49 days required by Rodgers.

Boeing Dash-80

If man was able to travel all the way to the Moon and back, and do so repeatedly without a single death or flight failure during the years 1969-1972, why has man traveled no further than a small fraction of that distance in the ensuing decades of space flight? Why did they not see the same progress in space technology as we saw in airplane technology during its history? If airplane progress mirrored manned space flight, after Rodgers 1911 flight across the United States, all airplane manufacturers would have gone back to perfecting short flights which went no further than 3-4 miles, with no one surpassing that distance in the next 44 years.

Such discrepancies can only be adequately explained by recognizing that man has never gone to the Moon and back. The Apollo Space Program is a myth. It was an illusion to deceive the masses, and it accomplished its purpose very well. If we remove the vaunted claims of the Apollo program, we find in NASA’s development of space flight something that parallels more consistently the progress witnessed in airplane development. From short solo trips into space by the first cosmonauts and astronauts, longer duration orbits around the Earth were made. Then came the development of the Space Shuttle and a series of small, orbiting space stations. The current state of the art is the International Space Station, which orbits at a height of 200 miles above the Earth. Only now can man think about going farther, but they have so far been unable to solve the problems preventing them from taking the leap beyond low Earth orbit into space.

Removing the myth of the Apollo program, we are left with a more plausible history of space exploration which still remains in its infancy. We find that in the 55 years since Yuri Gagarin reportedly first orbited the Earth, man has only been able to extend the time he can remain in orbit. The record is 437 days by Cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov in the Mir space station in 1995. Man has made life far more comfortable in low Earth orbit, and is able to carry out a far wider range of experiments, but he still is unable to travel through or beyond the Van Allen Radiation Belts.

America’s government continues to announce plans to send men to the Moon, Mars and beyond, but these announcements continue to be pushed back further and further. The more years pass without men going beyond low Earth orbit, the more apparent it becomes that man has never traveled to the Moon and back.

On July 20, 1989, President George H.W. Bush announced the Space Exploration Initiative (SEI). The SEI proposed a long term initiative, longer than the decade prescribed by Kennedy in his famous speech in 1961. The goals of the SEI were to first create a new space station dubbed Freedom, then send men to the Moon, and eventually send men to Mars. The President’s speech followed by two years the report entitled Leadership and America’s Future in Space, also known as the Ride Report in honor of astronaut Sally Ride who chaired the committee who produced it. The Ride Report, published in 1987, called for the establishment of a permanent Moon base by 2010.

Bear in mind that the Ride Report followed Apollo 17 by 15 years. Establishing a lunar base should have been doable if man had already placed astronauts on the lunar surface on 6 different occasions. Additionally, the goal of the Ride Report lay 23 years into the future. The Ride Report was suggesting that a permanently manned Moon based be established 38 years after the last Apollo Mission. Surely that must be considered an obtainable goal, representing only an incremental step beyond what man had achieved during the Apollo era.

Nevertheless, the Ride Report’s goals were never met. Men continued to go no further than a few hundred miles from the Earth’s surface. On January 4, 2004, President George W. Bush, son of the President who proposed the Space Exploration Initiative, announced the Vision for Space Exploration (VSE). The VSE called for a human return to the Moon by 2020. In response to the VSE, NASA launched the Constellation Program.

Constellation Program Logo

The three blue arcs of the Constellation logo represent the three stepped goal of the program. The first step was to complete the International Space Station. The second step was to return men to the Moon by 2020. The third step was to launch a crewed flight to Mars. In recognition of this third step, NASA began development of the Ares rocket, Ares being the Greek equivalent of the Roman god Mars.

It seems with every new President of the Unites States comes a new set of space exploration goals. The one thing they have in common is that they keep pushing back the date to return men to the Moon and to send them beyond that distance. In a 2010 article in the Los Angeles Times, we find the following statements.

President Obama outlined a dramatic new mission for NASA on Monday, getting the agency out of the rocket-launching business in favor of an aggressive expansion of research and development that would steer the agency away from the launch pad and instead put its engineers in the laboratory, where they would design futuristic vehicles capable of going beyond the moon.

As expected, his budget plan would cancel NASA's Constellation program and its goal of returning astronauts to the moon by 2020. The troubled rocket program, crippled by funding shortfalls and technical problems, ultimately would cost taxpayers at least $11.5 billion as it is, including $2.5 billion to terminate it.

Instead of pursuing Constellation, NASA would pay for commercial rocket companies to resupply the International Space Station over the next decade while its own workers develop new engines and rockets that NASA officials hope will enable a vast expansion of its future manned-space efforts.

"Imagine trips to Mars that take weeks instead of nearly a year, people fanning out across the inner solar system, exploring the moon, asteroids and Mars nearly simultaneously in a steady stream of firsts," said NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden.

It would be a decade or more, however, before NASA again sends astronauts beyond low-Earth orbit...

Bolden said ending Constellation was necessary to ensure NASA had the money to spend nearly $11 billion over the next five years on new technologies, including $3.1 billion to develop heavy-lift rockets that could carry new spacecraft beyond Earth orbit.

Currently, he said, the 5-year-old Constellation program is burning through billions of dollars and falling further behind schedule. The program couldn't get American astronauts back to the moon until at least 2028, he said.

"So as much as we would not like it to be the case . . . the truth is that we were not on a path to get back to the moon's surface," Bolden said.
[Source: http://articles.latimes.com/2010/feb/02/nation/la-na-budget-nasa2-2010feb02]

To summarize some of the highlights of this article. NASA’s Constellation Program was experiencing “technical problems” in its rocket development. NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said the Constellation could not return men to the Moon sooner than the year 2028. He frankly stated, “as much as we would not like it to be the case . . . the truth is that we were not on a path to get back to the moon's surface.”

The current NASA pipe dream is the Space Launch System (SLS). The SLS was initiated upon the cancellation of the Constellation Program in 2010. It envisions taking the Ares I and Ares V rockets of the Constellation Program and transforming them into a single heavy lift platform which will eventually have a 20% greater thrust than the Saturn V, while being able to carry the same payload. Notice, however, that all announcements relating to the SLS are in the future tense. “NASA plans deep space rocket.”

Houston, we have a problem! I hope it is obvious to readers that something is very much amiss with the NASA narrative. Why has NASA not been able to produce a single rocket with the advertised capabilities of the Apollo Program’s Saturn V, despite fifty years of development? What technical problems are hindering today’s rocket scientists, who have access to computer systems billions of times more powerful than those of the Apollo era, along with space age materials and other technological breakthroughs, from repeating something that men with slide rules and baling wire accomplished in the 1960s?

The obvious conclusion is that NASA lied about its accomplishments in the Apollo Program, and the lie was so extraordinary that man still cannot accomplish fifty years later what NASA boasted of accomplishing back then. I feel repulsed when I read the disingenuous words of NASA’s current administrator. “Imagine trips to Mars that take weeks instead of nearly a year, people fanning out across the inner solar system, exploring the moon, asteroids and Mars nearly simultaneously in a steady stream of firsts.” Yeah, just imagine! That is all it is, imagination. NASA can only encourage mankind to dream about space travel, for they have never sent anyone beyond low Earth orbit, nor are they anywhere close to doing so today.


The behavior of the American space program is itself a contradiction. How does one get from the first step into near Earth orbit and then all the way to the Moon in a decade, only to spend the next 50 years going no further than a few hundred miles, with no possibility of reaching the Moon with current technology? The lie is exposed in the false history of NASA’s mythology.

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