Ancient Aliens on the Moon (24 page)

These two radiation belts have different origins and compositions. The inner belt discovered by Van Allen occupies a region above the equator, is a byproduct of high-energy cosmic radiation, and is populated by protons of energies in the 10- 100MeV (Million electron Volt) range. These can penetrate spacecraft and on prolonged exposure, damage instruments and astronauts. The outer belt is an electron-plasma trapped in the magnetosphere from the Sun’s expanding solar wind, and has energies in the 0.1–10 MeV range.

Before we proceed, it is necessary to define a few terms. A RAD or Radiation Absorbed Dose, is a unit of measurement that determines the actual absorbed amount of radiation by any given material. The material can be plastic, metal, or biological, or anything else for that matter. It does not define the degree of biological damage that can occur to the absorbing individual, since different types of radiation can cause differing levels of damage to human tissues. Rather, it is a blanket number defining total radiation exposure of all types.

The REM, or Roentgen Equivalent Man, is a unit used to derive a quantity called an equivalent dose. This relates the absorbed dose in human tissue to the effective biological damage of the radiation. Not all radiation has the same biological effect, even for the same amount of absorbed dose. To determine equivalent dose (REM), you multiply absorbed dose (rad) by a quality factor (Q) that is unique to the type of incident radiation.

There are several mitigating factors that can affect the amount of damage done to human tissue by radiation exposure. Even if a specific type of radiation is very damaging to humans, if you limit the time that a person is bombarded by that radiation, you can reduce the effect on the person’s cells. This is why fair skinned people will not get sunburned if they are only outside without a sunblock for a few minutes. If they are outside for a few hours, they can get a very painful radiation burn. Continuous exposure of this type of radiation over years can lead to skin cancers.

This time element, or exposure, must always be considered alongside the intensity and quality of the radiation a person is exposed to. As a rule, acceptable doses for high risk individuals like astronauts are expressed in RAD’s. For example, 100 RAD’s will induce vomiting, over 150 RAD’s are fatal if untreated, and a 500-rad dose is fatal even with medical treatment. Delayed effects include cancer and other genetic changes. These long-term effects can occur even when the dose rates are far below the thresholds for any prompt effects.

After years of extensive study, NASA’s solution was simple; avoid exposure to the radiation in the belts by keeping the spacecraft at low Earth orbit altitudes while in parking orbits, and then send them through the belts at high speed. The eventual escape speed, some 25,000 miles per hour, would have passed them through the belts in less than an hour, keeping their dose well below 1 RAD. There was a modicum of shielding from the equipment, but in the end this was not necessary as the transition speed kept the dose below harmful limits—both going to and returning from the Moon.

As to the issue of solar flares and the danger they presented, there simply weren’t any major flares during any of the Apollo missions. So the biggest reason that none of the astronauts died from their radiation exposure was that the actual doses, in RAD’s, that the astronauts received were quite small. NASA spent millions to develop the necessary technology to insure that the astronauts that went to the Moon were protected from the physical threats of deep space and they were monitored at all times while travelling to and from the Moon.

In 2001, Fox Television broadcast a TV special called “Conspiracy Theory—Did we Land on the Moon?” Because this program raised some additional issues we did not specifically cover yet, in the interest of closure I have decided to address them here. Make no mistake, I was so unimpressed with this laughably stupid presentation initially that I was quite willing to let the previous part of this book be my final statement on the matter. But I guess I just can’t resist.

Claim 13 – There are cross hairs on pictures taken on the Moon that appear to be behind objects, rather than in front of them, where they should be.

The crosshairs, called reseau marks, were geometric indicators specifically put in the Apollo cameras by the vacuum deposition of a set of whisker-thin aluminum “crosses” on an optical glass plate, subsequently placed just in front of the film plane. The purpose of this (according to NASA) was to enable the NASA-Houston developers of the film to align multiple image panoramas vertically and horizontally, so that they might appear geometrically correct when printed.

The Fox special showed four examples of the crosshairs appearing behind objects in the pictures. One example each from Apollo 11 and 16, and two from the same frame on Apollo 12. In addition, I found another example on the Project Apollo image archive, AS16-117-18818. The four that were presented on the show are the same ones that seem to make the rounds of all the Moon Hoax sites, and I have not seen any other examples although, as I just demonstrated, it seems fairly easy to do so.

Reseau crosshair appearing behind an instrument.

Crosshair blending into astronauts’ white suit.

The argument made by the Moon Hoax advocates (primarily the late James Collier, David Percy, Bill Kaysing, “brilliant lay physicist” Ralph Rene, and the late Dr. Brian O’Leary) is that these obscured reseau marks “prove” that the photos taken on the Moon are faked. They imply that the marks were added
after
the photos were taken to make it appear that they were taken on the moon but that NASA screwed up some of these fake reseau marks.

It’s hard to follow this convoluted logic. If NASA were faking these pictures in a movie studio at Area 51, as Fox and Kaysing alleged, why wouldn’t they simply have used cameras with the same aluminized, pre-marked plates in them that were used on the real Apollo cameras? Wouldn’t that be easier than painstakingly adding the marks one by one by hand to every single Apollo hand held photograph? And if the pictures were all faked, why add the marks at all? Wouldn’t it be easier to just avoid the whole hassle by skipping the reseau marks completely?

Now, in fairness, some of the Hoax crowd has claimed that these apparent retouches aren’t truly just stupid mistakes by NASA after all, but a deliberate code. They claimed (without evidence) that certain “patriotic Americans” working in the NASA photo lab and outraged by the huge hoax being perpetuated by Apollo, deliberately made “little mistakes” in placing the crosses on some photographs. The purported purpose was to telegraph the fact that the whole Moon program was as fake as the photographs themselves. As ingenious as this explanation might appear to some, there is a far simpler and more likely solution.

For one thing, in all the pictures presented, the marks are obscured by white areas of the pictures. Be they the white stripes of the American flag, the white covering of a scientific instrument, or an astronauts’ spacesuit. Anyone who has ever developed color film will tell you that white tends to bleed a bit into other colors, and given that the crosshairs are only few thousands of an inch across, it’s easy to assume that this is the explanation. As far as I know, none of the Moon Hoax advocates has ever actually examined the negatives of these frames, either. Certainly, if the blotting out of the crosshairs is an anomaly of the printing process, then the negatives should probably have the full reseau marks visible and we will have our explanation. It is also probable that the highly reflective white surfaces just got slightly overexposed in some photographs, simply blotting out the razor thin marks.

But, failing in that, there is another, even better explanation. The pictures
were
deliberately altered.

Wait a minute; doesn’t that imply just what the Moon Hoax advocates are saying? That the photos are really are faked—and for over thirty years someone’s been trying to blow the whistle?

No. Of course it doesn’t.

There is a huge, huge difference between “altered” and “faked.” It’s a fairly safe bet that numerous Apollo pictures were altered, and there is nothing sinister at all about it.

In each case that I have seen, including the one that I personally found, the altered crosshairs (if that’s what they are) are from the NASA press release collection for the Apollo Program. It is an entirely common practice for press release photos to be “cleaned up” before publication, and there is no reason at all to think that the Apollo Missions to the Moon were excluded from this practice. It is difficult for us, in this digital age, to appreciate the importance of print media in the days of the Apollo Program. Many Americans got their view of Apollo not from TV, but from newspapers and magazines like
Look, Life
, and
National Geographic.
A potential press release quality photo (say, of an astronaut standing next to the American flag) would of course be cropped, blots and flaws would be airbrushed out, and perhaps an offending reseau mark would be kept from crossing in front of the Flag itself.

One final point: Over the last 15 years, Richard Hoagland, Steve Troy and I have examined literally thousands of Apollo pictures taken on the lunar surface. The only ones which have had this issue with the crosshairs have come from the press release collection—exclusively. We have simply not seen this phenomena on any of the non- press pictures. Or more importantly, their photographic negatives.

Another picture that has made the rounds of the Moon Hoax sites is the infamous “C” rock. This is supposedly a picture from an Apollo surface photograph showing what appears to be the letter “C” etched on it. Moon Hoax advocates claim that this is a mark for stage props, so the stage hands would know where to place the fake rock. But, if this were a “prop rock” from a studio collection, why would NASA use a classification system (the Arabic alphabet) that limited them to only 26 “prop rocks” in any given lunar landscape? Obviously, they wouldn’t.

At any rate, after finding the photo in question (AS16-17445-46), a cursory examination of the prints and negatives in the NASA master files revealed that the letter “C” was simply a hair or fiber that got on the scanning bed while the photo was being scanned for NASA archive websites. No analog or other digital source ever showed the “C” anywhere on the rock in question.

The Apollo “C” rock – a hair on the scanned print.

But enough of this. There are many additional claims made by the Moon Hoax advocates, all of which fall pretty much into the same category of silliness or nonsense. There is no question that the Apollo missions were real, and that NASA sent six teams of astronauts to the Moon to investigate its mysteries. The far more interesting questions are just what exactly they were looking for, and just what exactly they found…

¹
http://www.braeunig.us/space/69-19.htm

I
n our previous book
Dark Mission
, Richard C. Hoagland and I discussed just what each of the Apollo missions was intended to
really
do behind the scenes as opposed to what was publically admitted as the scientific and technical goals of each mission: What the “Dark Mission” of each of the Apollo landings might be. Reading that book might help in understanding some of the ritualistic motives involved. In the end, we came to these loose conclusions about each of them: