The Wrong Stuff
Are you sure we went to the moon 25 years ago? Are you positive?
Millions of Americans believe the moon landings may
have been a US$25 billion swindle, perpetrated by NASA with the
latest in communications technology and the best in
special effects. Wired plunges into the combat zone between
heated conspiracy believers and exasperated NASA
officials.
By Rogier van Bakel
"Columbia, he has landed Tranquility Base. Eagle is at
Tranquility. I read you five by. Over." The voice from
Houston
betrayed no emotion, although this was anything but business as
usual. A human being was about to set foot on the
moon for the first time in history, armed only with the Stars and
Stripes, some scientific instruments, and an almost
reckless, can-do demeanor that had captivated the world.
The reply from Columbia, the command-and-service module that had
released the lunar lander 2 hours and 33 minutes
earlier, betrayed only equal professional cool. "Yes, I
heard the whole thing," Michael Collins said
matter-of-factly.
Houston: "Well, it's a good show."
Columbia: "Fantastic."
That's when Neil Armstrong chimed in. "Yeah, I'll second
that," said the 38-year-old astronaut, the moonwalker-to-be,
America's own Boy Scout, and the most famous man in the - well,
in the universe. And even though the static ate away at
the clarity of his consonants, Armstrong's sneering tone came
through loud and clear. The mission control man heard it
too. And he knew what was coming. Sort of.
"A fantastic show," Armstrong said. "The greatest
show on earth, huh, guys?"
There was a moment's silence. Then a cameraman sniggered. And the
director sighed, and did what directors do when
actors screw up their lines. "Cut," he groaned. He was
a heavyset man in his 50s, and the combination of the long hours
and the hot studio lights had started to get to him.
"Shit, Armstrong, if you're gonna be a smart-ass, do it on
your own time, all right? We got 25 tired people on this set. We
got a billion people who are going to be watching your every move
only a week from now. We're on deadline here. Now,
do you suppose you could just stick to the script and get it over
with? Thank you."
His assistant stepped forward with the slate. "Apollo moon
landing, scene 769/A22, take three," she announced.
"Action!"
"Columbia, he has landed Tranquility Base," the mission
control man began again.
Superfraud
The history books lie. So do the encyclopedias and the
commemorative videos and the 25-year-old coffee mugs with the
proudly smiling faces of Neil Armstrong, Edwin Aldrin, and
Michael Collins. When Armstrong got down from that ladder,
proclaiming that it was only a small step for him but a giant
leap for mankind, he was merely setting foot on a
dust-covered sound stage in a top-secret TV studio in the Nevada
desert. NASA's cold warriors and spin doctors faked
the whole moon landing. Come to think of it, they faked all six
moon landings - spending around US$25 billion to prove to
the world that not even the Soviets, especially not the Soviets,
could hold a candle to the US when it came to space
exploration.
Well, at least, that's the view of writer Bill Kaysing. It's also
the conviction of millions of Americans who have learned to
distrust their government with a passion. Most of these skeptics
don't even appear to be steamed about the alleged
superfraud. They shrug and raise their palms and go about their
business. Not Kaysing. He seems to have never heard a
conspiracy theory he didn't like, and this one tops 'em all. For
almost 20 years now, he has been trying to get out "the
most electrifying news story of the entire 20th century and
possibly of all time." He has written a book aptly titled We
Never Went to the Moon and won't give up trying to uncover more
evidence.
Kaysing, a white-haired, gentle Californian whose energy level
seems mercifully untouched by his 72 years, worked as
head of technical publications for the Rocketdyne Research
Department at their Southern California facility from 1956 to
1963. Rocketdyne was the engine contractor for Apollo.
"NASA couldn't make it to the moon, and they knew it,"
asserts Kaysing, who, after begging out of the "corporate
rat
race," became a freelance author of books and newsletters.
"In the late '50s, when I was at Rocketdyne, they did a
feasibility study on astronauts landing on the moon. They found
that the chance of success was something like .0017
percent. In other words, it was hopeless." As late as 1967,
Kaysing reminds me, three astronauts died in a horrendous
fire on the launch pad. "It's also well documented that NASA
was often badly managed and had poor quality control. But
as of '69, we could suddenly perform manned flight upon manned
flight? With complete success? It's just against all
statistical odds."
President John F. Kennedy wasn't convinced at all that the
endeavor was next to impossible. In fact, he had publicly
announced in May 1961 that "landing a man on the moon and
returning him safely to earth" would be a Number One
priority for the US, an accomplishment that was to instill pride
in Americans and awe in the rest of the world. And so,
Kaysing believes, NASA faked it, acting in accordance with the
old adage that in a war, the truth is often the first casualty.
(Cold wars, he and his fellow conspiracy believers say, are no
exception.)
To hear him tell it, NASA had good reason to stage moon landing
after moon landing, instead of simply admitting that
lunar strolls would have to remain the stuff of science fiction
novels, at least for a while. "They - both NASA and
Rocketdyne - wanted the money to keep pouring in. I've worked in
aerospace long enough to know that's their goal."
Absent Stars
There is an almost instinctive rejoinder to all of this: but we
saw it. If television ever had a killer app, the moon landing was
it. We bought new sets in droves, flicked them on as zero hour
approached, and, miraculously, felt ourselves being
locked into an intangible but very real oneness with a billion
other people. It was our first taste of a virtual community, of
cultures docking. It felt good. And now there's this guy telling
us that it was all a lie? C'mon! His rockets are a little loose.
What proof does he have anyway?
Kaysing points out numerous anomalies in NASA publications, as
well as in the TV and still pictures that came from the
moon. For example, there are no stars in many of the photographs
taken on the lunar surface. With no atmosphere to
diffuse their light, wouldn't stars have to be clearly visible?
And why is there no crater beneath the lunar lander, despite
the jet of its 10,000-pound-thrust hypergolic engine? How do
NASA's experts explain pictures of astronauts on the moon
in which the astronauts' sides and backs are just as well lit as
the fronts of their spacesuits - which is inconsistent with the
deep, black shadows the harsh sunlight should be casting? And why
is there a line between a sharp foreground and a
blurry background in some of the pictures, almost as if
special-effects makers had used a so-called "matte
painting" to
simulate the farther reaches of the moonscape? "It all
points to an unprecedented swindle," Kaysing concludes
confidently.
But just how could NASA possibly have pulled it off? How about
the TV pictures that billions of people saw over the
course of six successful missions: the rocket lifting off from
the Cape Kennedy launch pad under the watchful eye of
hundreds of thousands of spectators; the capsule with the crew
returning to earth; the moon rocks; the hundreds,
perhaps thousands, of space-program employees in the know who
would have to be relied upon to take the incredible
secret to their graves?
Easy, says Kaysing. The rockets took off all right, with the
astronauts on board, but as soon as they were out of sight, the
roaring spacecraft set course for the south polar sea, jettisoned
its crew, and crashed. Later, the crew and the command
module were put in a military plane and dropped in the Pacific
for "recovery" by an aircraft carrier. (Kaysing claims
that he
talked with an airline pilot who, en route from San Francisco to
Tokyo, saw the Apollo 15 command module sliding out of
an unidentified cargo plane, but he can't provide the captain's
name or the name of the airline.) The moon rocks were
made in a NASA geology lab, right here on earth, he continues.
Not very many people on the Apollo project knew about
the hoax, as they were only informed on a need-to-know basis.
Cash bonuses, promotions, or veiled threats could have
ensured the silence of those who were in on the whole scheme.
Zero Gravity
Kaysing is not alone in his assertion that NASA has been, um,
mooning the public. Bill Brian, a 45-year-old Oregonian
who authored the 1982 book Moongate, agrees that there is
"some sort of cover-up." Although Brian thinks that his
fellow
investigator may very well be right in saying that we never went
to the moon, he believes there is an entirely different
reason for many of the inconsistencies the two have found. Maybe
we did go, Brian says, but it's possible we reached the
moon with the aid of a secret zero gravity device that NASA
probably reverse-engineered by copying parts of a captured
extraterrestrial spaceship. Brian, who received BS and MS degrees
in nuclear engineering at Oregon State University
(although he now holds a job as a policy and procedures analyst
at a utility company), uses his "mathematical and
conceptual skills" to reason that the moon's gravity is
actually similar to Earth's, and that most likely, the moon has
an
atmosphere after all. He has crammed the appendices of his book
with complex calculations to prove these points, but he
trusts his intuition, too: "The NASA transcripts of the
communication between the astronauts and mission control read as
if they're carefully scripted. The accounts all have a very
strange flavor to them, as if the astronauts weren't really
there."
But why in the world would NASA feel compelled to cover up
knowledge of a high-gravity moon? "It's a cascading string
of
events," explains Brian. "You can't let one bit of
information out without blowing the whole thing. They'd have to
explain
the propulsion technique that got them there, so they'd have to
divulge their UFO research. And if they could tap this
energy, that would imply the oil cartels are at risk, and the
very structure of our world economy could collapse. They
didn't want to run that risk."
As this issue of Wired goes to press, a new book is headed to the
stores: Was It Only a Paper Moon, by Ralph Ren, "a
scientist and patented inventor." Published by tiny Victoria
House Press in New York, in what it has announced will be a
first run of "at least 100,000 copies," Paper Moon
supposedly presents the latest scientific findings regarding the
moon
landing. Ren offers data suggesting, among other things, that
without an impractical shield about two meters thick, the
spacemen "would have been cooked by radiation" during
the journey. Ergo, the lunar endeavors were impossible, and
were cynically faked at the expense of gullible people
everywhere.
Other conspiracy buffs don't doubt that men walked on the moon
but call the fact irrelevant because extraterrestrials
made it there ages ago - and NASA knows it and has preferred to
keep it a secret. In his recent book, Extra-Terrestrial
Archeology, David Childress points out various unexplained
structures on the moon and argues that these might be
archeological remnants of intelligent civilizations. Childress,
an avid believer in UFOs, also doesn't rule out the possibility
that aliens still use the moon as a base and a convenient
stepping stone for their trips to our planet. This might even
mean, enthuses the author, that the moon is really "a
spaceship with an inner metallic-rock shell beneath miles of dirt
and
dust and rock."
Children and Senators
Although very few Americans subscribe to such grandiose theories,
millions of people doubt the authenticity of the lunar
missions, much to NASA's exasperation. Over the years, the
agency's public services department went through reams of
paper answering incredulous schoolchildren, teachers, librarians
- and even US lawmakers like former Sen. Alan
Cranston (D-California) and Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-South
Carolina), who had written to NASA relaying the doubts of
some of their constituents. As many as 100 million Americans,
says Kaysing, are inclined to disbelieve the whole lunar
adventure. Like many of his statements, that one should be taken
with a grain of salt: his proof is based on his
observation that "almost half the people who phoned in to
radio and TV shows" he has been on supported him. That's
hardly irrefutable proof.
But when Knight Newspapers (one of the two groups that later
merged to form Knight-Ridder Inc.) polled 1,721 US
residents one year after the first moon landing, it found that
more than 30 percent of respondents were suspicious of
NASA's trips to the moon. A July 20, 1970, Newsweek article
reporting the results of the poll cited "an elderly
Philadelphia
woman who thought the moon landing had been staged in an Arizona
desert" and a Macon, Georgia, housewife who
questioned how a TV set that couldn't pull in New York stations
could possibly "receive signals from the moon." The
greatest skepticism, according to Newsweek, surfaced in a ghetto
in Washington, DC, where more than half of those
interviewed doubted the authenticity of Neil Armstrong's stroll.
"It's all a deliberate effort to mask problems at
home,"
explained one inner-city preacher. "The people are unhappy -
and this takes their minds off their problems."
Poll or no poll, even James Oberg, a nemesis of Kaysing,
conservatively estimates that the disbelievers may number
between 10 and 25 million Americans.
Oberg works for NASA contractor Rockwell International as a
space-flight operations engineer with the space shuttle
program. He writes as a second profession, covering all aspects
of space activity, with a special interest in space folklore.
Myths have a way of blossoming in the fertile soil of scientific
discovery, Oberg notes. "Every age of exploration is the
same in that respect - from the time of the Phoenicians...to
Marco Polo, and including mermaids and unipeds and all
these mythological creatures that lurk at the edge of our
exploration. To me, it's extremely humanizing to have this
typically human reaction - this denial, this myth making - to our
lunar adventure. I'm not at all surprised that these stories
or interpretations exist. Actually, I'm surprised they aren't
more widespread."
Nonetheless, hoax believers can be found in many parts of
society, here and abroad. According to Oberg, Cuban
children are officially taught that Yankee space technology
failed miserably and that NASA was reduced to pitifully faking
every single lunar landing. Some New Agers also contest the
possibility of moon landings, as do Hare Krishnas.
Non-mainstream Christians at the Flat Earth Society - a
Lancaster, California-based anti-science group of about 3,500
members - contest the entire field of astronomy (not to mention
moon landings). They liken the towering launch pads to
the Tower of Babel.
The eccentricity of such convictions certainly intrigues Oberg.
"I respect these people's dedication to their view of the
world. One reason they fascinate me is that they're a constant
reminder to me that we can't rest on common knowledge,
we can't be complacent with our traditional interpretations of
things - even though these interpretations are almost always
right. But I also find their pathology of reasoning, or
non-reasoning, compelling. We define health by the boundaries of
pathology, and I try and define rational thought by looking at
cases that go over the edge."
That's damning praise indeed. So it's no surprise that Bill
Kaysing doesn't much care for James Oberg, whom he
dismisses as "a NASA agent."
Good Timing
If NASA had really wanted to fake the moon landings - we're
talking purely hypothetical here - the timing was certainly
right. The advent of television, having reached worldwide
critical mass only years prior to the moon landing, would prove
instrumental to the fraud's success; in this case, seeing really
was believing. The magic of satellites, with their ability to
enable live global (and interplanetary?) communication,
fascinated and awed millions of people, much like anything
atomic had caught the public's fancy in the previous decade.
Also, space research and rocket science had advanced far
enough to make a trip to the moon likely - or, at the very least,
remotely feasible. "The structural nature of technology
had changed to make the moon landing possible, but that also made
it possible for people to doubt it," says Gary Fine, a
sociology professor at the University of Georgia in Athens
specializing in rumor and contemporary legend.
Perhaps more importantly, Watergate hadn't happened yet, and
people still trusted their elected officials. "A distrust of
authority clearly plays into this whole thing," argues Fred
Fedler, who teaches journalism at the University of Central
Florida and has written a book on media hoaxes. "With
Vietnam and Watergate, people have become less trusting, and
to some people it doesn't matter what the government says; their
immediate reaction is to disbelieve and to sometimes
embrace the opposite view."
The distrust continues to be fed by the mass media, especially in
the film and TV business. It is rare to find a movie in
which a government agency is actually depicted as a collection of
fairly efficient, competent people who serve their
country to the best of their ability. Dramatically speaking, an
elite of sinister, evil bureaucrats is much more appealing.
Linda Degh, a retired folklorist who taught at Indiana University
in Bloomington, and who has recently published a book
titled American Folklore and Mass Media, is reminded of the film
Capricorn One. Released in 1978, Capricorn One tells
the story of a staged flight to Mars. The astronauts grapple with
the moral implications of the giant charade and fear they
might be killed to keep them from blowing the whistle. Sure
enough, they find themselves hunted down by bloodthirsty
government thugs; only one of the astronauts makes it to freedom
and reporters' microphones. Degh recalls that it was
"quite a slanderous movie, pretending that the government
had been killing people," and she believes that it must have
given a powerful boost to the moon-landing hoax theory. "The
mass media catapult these half-truths into a kind of twilight
zone where people can make their guesses sound as truths. Mass
media have a terrible impact on people who lack
guidance."
007 Uncovers Hoax
Peter Hyams, Capricorn One's director, agrees that mass media can
be very powerful - dangerously so, in fact. "My
parents believed that if it was in The New York Times, it was
true. I was part of the generation that grew up believing that
if we saw it on television, it was true. And I learned how
inaccurate newspapers were, and I realized that TV is just as
inaccurate, or it can be. So I said, wouldn't it be interesting
if you took a major event where the only source that people
have is a television screen, and you showed how easy it would be
to manipulate everybody." Hyams insists that he made
Capricorn One "for entertainment, for fun," not because
he was making not-so-veiled references to the alleged Apollo
hoax. "I was aware that there were people who believed that
we never walked on the moon, but I never read their books
or consulted with them. And frankly, I think they are being
totally ludicrous." (Nevertheless, an invitation to a sneak
preview screening at the time of Capricorn One's release said:
"Would you be shocked to find out that the greatest
moment of our recent history may not have happened at all?")
The concept of the moon swindle holds a certain appeal for other
filmmakers as well. In Diamonds Are Forever (1971),
James Bond accidentally stumbles onto a movie set that consists
of rocks, a lunar backdrop, and a vehicle that looks like
NASA's Eagle. Men in spacesuits move about slowly and clumsily,
as if simulating low gravity. Bond's pursuers give
chase, but 007 - stirred, but not shaken - climbs into the lunar
lander and makes his escape. The scene is never
explained. In the high-tech thriller Sneakers (1992), Dan
Aykroyd's character, a gadgeteer and conspiracy enthusiast,
refers to the moon landing by casually remarking: "This
LTX71 concealable mike is part of the same system NASA used
when they faked the Apollo moon landings." And a small San
Francisco Bay area production company with a big name,
Independent Film and Video Productions, is working on an
as-yet-untitled feature film in which a writer discovers that the
moon landings may have been simulated - and then nearly gets
killed in his quest for the truth.
Simulating One-Sixth Gravity
Technically speaking, could the moon landings have been faked?
Was the state of special effects advanced enough in
the late '60s to fool even the most discriminating eye?
Simulating one-sixth gravity could have been done with the use of
hydraulic cranes and thin wires - the Peter Pan approach - or by
filming scenes under water, says Dennis Muren. Muren,
an eight-time Oscar winner, is the senior visual effects
supervisor at Industrial Light & Magic, a division of Lucas
Digital.
He was responsible for making the Jurassic Park monsters come
alive and for key scenes in Terminator 2, Star Wars,
and The Abyss.
"A moon landing simulation might have looked pretty real to
99.9 percent of the people. The thing is, though, that it
wouldn't have looked the way it did. I've always been acutely
aware of what's fake and what's real, and the moon landings
were definitely real," Muren stipulates. "Look at 2001
or Destination Moon or Capricorn One or any other space movie:
everybody was wrong. That wasn't the way the moon looked at all.
There was an unusual sheen to the images from the
moon, in the way that the light reflected in the camera, that is
literally out of this world. Nobody could have faked that."
Of course, Bill Kaysing will have none of it: "Perhaps this
guy [Muren] was part of the cover-up. Anything is possible."
Kaysing likes to paraphrase Alvin Toffler: "He writes that
most people are producer/consumers - he calls them prosumers.
They go through life not questioning anything, not knowing
anything. Ninety percent of the American population has no
idea what's going on in this country. I'd like to be the one to
tell them - tell them at least part of it. I'm either going to
share
the truth about the moon with them, or I am going to die
trying."
NASA Bites Back
Q: Why is there no discernible crater beneath the lunar lander?
A: "Although the descent engine of the LM is powerful, most
of its operation takes place thousands of feet above the
moon during the early stages of the landing," says a NASA
information sheet. "At the moment of touchdown, a small
amount of surface dust is blown away, but the relatively cohesive
lunar surface seems to deflect the blast sideways."
Q: Why is there an artificial-looking line between a sharp
foreground and a blurry background in some of the
pictures of the lunar surface?
A: "What you see is simply the curvature of the moon,"
explains Paul Lowman, a NASA geophysicist. "Because the moon
is such a small body, the curvature horizon is only two or three
miles away from eye level. That sharp line you see in
some pictures is the visible horizon. The blurry part you see is
caused by mountains sticking up from beyond the
horizon."
Q: Why are there no stars in many of the photos taken on the
moon?
A: "That's one of Kaysing's sillier arguments," says
James Oberg, a space-flight operations engineer with the space
shuttle program. "Go out at night and take a picture of
yourself under a streetlight. Even if there's a star-studded sky,
you'll see no stars in your picture because the camera was set to
properly expose that big lighted object in the
foreground - you - and will not register much weaker light
sources."
Q: How about the various lighting anomalies?
A: "On some pictures, astronauts are lit from more than one
side because the sunlight is reflected off the lunar surface or
off the landing vehicle," says NASA spokesperson James
Hartsfield. Paul Lowman adds that some conspiracy believers
are unknowingly or deliberately using pictures of astronauts that
NASA never claimed were taken on the moon. "There
are pictures being passed on and published in their circles that
appeared in pre-moon landing issues of Aviation Week -
nothing mysterious about them," sighs Lowman. "These
are photos taken in a moon-like training facility at the Johnson
Space Center where, indeed, there were several sources of
light."
Moon Hoaxes of Yesteryear: Pigs Might Fly
Not to rain on anyone's parade - but a balloon-faring Dutchman
walked on the moon some 140 years before Neil
Armstrong did. In the Southern Literary Messenger of June 1835,
Edgar Allan Poe published the first installment of that
prodigious fable, which he unsuccessfully tried to pass off as a
genuine news story.
Fed up with his miserable life in Rotterdam, one Hans Pfaall, an
unemployed bellows mender, secretly built a giant
balloon. His goal: "to force a passage, if I could, to the
moon." He gambled that he would gradually get accustomed to
the
very high altitudes. Pfaall purportedly took off on April 1, and,
because of the thinning atmosphere, soon suffered spasms
and began bleeding from the ears, nose, and eyes. He made it
though: after 19 days in space, the Flying Dutchman
landed in a crowd of ugly little moon people, who "stood
like a parcel of idiots, grinning in a ludicrous manner, and
eyeing
me and my balloon askant, with their arms set akimbo."
Despite the awkward welcome, the world's first astronaut lived
among the unsightly critters for five years, then wrote a
letter to the Mayor of Rotterdam in which he described some of
his experiences and negotiated his return. A lunar
messenger whom Pfaall had entrusted with the missive did reach
the city (by balloon, of course) but couldn't be
persuaded to land; after dropping off the letter, he disappeared
into the heavens without waiting for a reply - no doubt,
Poe muses, "frightened to death by the savage appearance of
the residents of Rotterdam." (Poe's story is recounted in
Media Hoaxes, a book written by Fred Fedler and published in 1989
by Iowa State University.)
Imagine a telescope lens with a diameter of 24 feet and a weight
of almost 15,000 pounds. With it, you could see insects
on the moon. OK, so there is no life on the moon - but that's not
what the readers of the New York Sun were told. In
August 1835, the penny paper reported the "findings" of
the British astronomer Sir John Herschel. In a six-part series,
reporter Richard Adams Locke wrote that the scientist, using a
huge custom-built telescope in a planetarium at the Cape
of Good Hope (at the southern tip of Africa), had spotted many
spectacular species on the moon. Among them: horned
bears, tailless beavers, and 4-foot-tall ape-like creatures with
thick beards and large wings. Locke referred to them as
"bat-men." Actually, there were plenty of bat-women
too, and the two sexes engaged freely in behavior that Locke
declined to describe - it would have been "improper" on
earth.
Herschel was a legitimate, respected scientist who remained
unaware of his fictional discoveries for months. When word
of Locke's elaborate yarn reached him, he reportedly laughed and
tried to expose the hoax - to little avail.
On June 20, 1977, Anglia TV in England caused a nationwide stir
when it broadcast a documentary called Alternative
Three. By linking facts with half-truths, and by staging
interviews with so-called "astronomers" and
"astronauts," the
makers suggested that both NASA's space program and the Cold War
were decoys. The power elite in the USSR, the US,
and Great Britain had in fact been working together on a secret
project - Alternative Three - that had established bases
on the moon and on Mars, so that they could escape the coming
ecological nightmare on earth. Insiders who were
deemed a security risk were callously murdered. Scientists had
been abducted to do experiments in the space colonies.
Even ordinary folks had been snatched and forced into slave labor
on the moon and on the red planet.
Surprise! It was all a hoax, made clear by the closing credits
that listed the actors on the show and that contained a
copyright notice dated April 1. Nonetheless, Anglia was flooded
with calls, and newspaper headlines reported "shock"
and
"panic." To this day, some people believe that all of
it, or some of it, is true.
Anagram enthusiasts will find that Rogier van Bakel
(rogiernl@aol.com) has Brave Ink Galore. He is a Dutch
correspondent in Washington, DC.
INTERVIEW AND NOTES on Bill Kaysing!
.....................................................Thank You Bill Kaysing......Ross Marshall
Billy Kaysing says he would not be inclined to settle his pending lawsuit against former astronaut James Lovell because his "goal is to reveal to the American public that the government lies about important things."
"They lie to us, they cheat us, and I want to open the lid to Pandora's box," he said in an early June telephone interview. "I want only to appear in court without any attorney, on my own in front of a jury, and present my complete case."
Kaysing, a former technical writer for Rocketdyne, a California corporation that worked on rocket engines for the Lunar Module (known as the LEM) which supposedly landed on the moon six times between 1969-72, and author of "We Never Went To The Moon" filed a malicious libel suit against Apollo astronaut James Lovell last August because Lovell called him a "wacko" in an article which appeared in San Jose's "Metro Weekly Magazine" Kaysing had high praise for the recent video produced by seasoned investigator Ross Marshall: "We Never Went To The Moon?" The video recounts numerous lingering questions about the moon program, including:
* The apparent physical impossibility of two astronauts, fully loaded with gear,to enter and exit the lunar module.
* Analysis of the shadows supposedly cast on the moon by the astronauts and their equipment, shadows that many believe do not correspond with the configuration of the sun and moon during the landings.
* The fact that NASA never took pictures of the earth from the moon, which skeptics say would have proven the landings as well as provided earthlings with startling, inspiring footage. Skeptics also charge that the photographs that were taken show no stars. * The apparent inclusion of "sky-blue"footage taken by astronauts in deep space.
While the video is a good compendium of the theories that have floated about for some time, Kaysing says its strongest suit is that Collier "publicly challenges NASA officials to prove him wrong. A really outstanding aspect is that he went to Houston and Washington to question NASA officials, and those personal confrontations are outstanding." Kaysing says his lawsuit and Collier's video are but two of several fronts in which the moon controversy is being resurrected. A Nashville, Tenn. producer is currently working on a video but thus far has been unsuccessful in getting Neil Armstrong to answer some lingering questions, Kaysing said.
"The first time he got turned away, and the second Neil told him if he came back again he would get arrested." Kaysing said.
"The astronauts themselves are bring forced into corners by people who want answers to cogent questions."
Nardwuar: For years, Bill, I've heard the rumour that Disney faked the moon landing. Now you're here, Mr. Kaysing, to prove it's true, aren't you? R.E.M. sang, "If you believe they put a man on the moon", you're here to prove it, aren't you, Mr. Kaysing?
Bill Kaysing: I'm here to prove that no man has ever landed on the moon.
NTHS: What's the background for that? There are lots of books on this subject, aren't there?
BK: Oh yeah, there are quite a few and there are more coming all the
time. Interestingly, several people have, and will, produce videotapes
based on my material.
NTHS: There's a new book out, N.A.S.A. Mooned America.
BK: Yes, that's by a man named Ralph Rene, who lives in Pasaic,
New Jersey, and the book is very well-done. It's far superior to my
book because Rene is essentially a self-taught engineer, and he's
come up with a lot of important points that I missed completely.
NTHS: Well your book, We Never Went to the Moon, Bill,
was probably the first book to expose the moon hoax,
wasn't it?
BK: Yes, it was
written in 1974 and
has essentially been
available ever since.
NTHS: Rene calls
astronauts,
'astro-nots',
which is very interesting.
BK: Yes, that is true. He has a good comic sense.
NTHS: Bill Kaysing, can you give your background of your
involvement in the space program and what the official
government line is about people landing on the moon?
BK: I was for seven years head of technical publications for the
Rocketdyne Research Department at the Propulsion Field Laboratory
in the Simi Hills, that's near Kenoga Park, California, and during that
time I had top-secret clearance and Atomic Energy Commission
(A.E.C.) clearance and of course I was in on all of the top secrets
about the development of Mercury and Gemini and, of course, Atlas,
and, eventually, Apollo. And my experience as a technical writer led
me to believe that a lot of the things that the aerospace industry and
NASA preferred to have done, were never done. And they were not as
successful as they pretended to be. [As to the second question,] the
government claims that the reports of astronauts and photographs and
some rocks prove that we went to the moon and my feeling is that
some photos and some people who have been under military pay or
military jurisdiction all their lives and some rocks don't prove a thing.
In fact, there is so much contrary evidence to going to the moon, such
as solar and cosmic radiation, micro meteorites, the temperature on
the moon, the fact that the astronauts never reported how magnificent
the stars were or they never showed a picture of the crater that should
have been dug underneath the lunar lander - it goes on and on. I have
hundreds of pieces of information that any really intelligent person
could review and then decide for themselves.
NTHS: Well, particularly, Mr. Kaysing, could you just
prove it here with some little points, that we actually did
not go to the moon. In your book you mention that there
were no stars in the photos that NASA took.
BK: That's right, and they had the most marvelous opportunity to
take pictures of all the stars in the universe visible from the moon.
I've talked to a number of top-level astronauts, both locally and
elsewhere, and they say that the astronauts would have been
overwhelmed by the sight of trillions of stars, not to mention Jupiter
and Saturn and the other planets and so forth, but not one picture has
ever come back from the alleged trip to the moon showing the stars in
all their magnificence, nor do any of the astronauts comment on the
stars. They completely ignore it. It would be like going to Niagara
Falls and talking about the hamburger you ate.
NTHS: Doesn't NASA say that the reason there were no
stars is because their cameras weren't set for the proper
exposure, isn't that their line?
BK: That's their line and that's pure baloney, because I've talked to
photographic experts who say that NASA have all the money in the
world to have a camera that would have taken magnificent pictures of
stars. But there's a little problem, you know, the temperature on the
moon is 250F during the lunar day, and a friend of mine put some film
in an oven and ran it up to 250 and the film just curled up. If you
notice that the Hasselblad camera is worn outside of the astronaut's
suit and it is not curled in any way. So that camera would have heated
up to the temperature to bake cookies in a very short time, because
the Sun on the moon is absolutely relentless, there's no atmosphere to
mitigate the heat of the Sun. So it's obvious that the pictures that they
brought back were not taken on the moon, nor could they have
actually taken any pictures on the moon, even if they had gone there.
NTHS: So apparently they faked the moon landing. If the
moon landing was faked, how come they didn't include
stars in their studio, apparently in the Nevada desert where
they were faking the moon landing?
BK: They could not fake the stars and maps because there are too
many astronomy buffs, and I've talked to a lot of them. They would
have measured the angularity between stars and the position of the
stars behind, let's say, the Earth. No way, even with the most
advanced computers, could they have created star pictures that would
have been, let's say, acceptable to the astronomy buffs. So at MIT,
where the simulation took place, the planning for it took place, they
simply decided to stonewall it and not include any pictures of stars at
all.
NTHS: Where was the moon landing faked? Somewhere in
the Nevada desert? What's the deal on that, Bill Kaysing?
BK: Well it's said that there's an area near Quebec that looks just
like the moon and that the astronauts spent some time up there. They
spent lots of time in the Nevada desert and it looks a great deal like
the moon. But here's the kicker - there's an Air Force base near San
Bernardino, called Norton Air Force Base, and they have the world's
largest sound stages under tremendously efficient security. They
could have easily created all of the moon sets in those sound stages
and filmed to their hearts' content.
NTHS: This was in the Nevada desert.
BK: Well, this was in Norton Air Force Base in San Bernardino, but
they could have done it in the Nevada desert in an area called 51,
which is the north-east corner of the A.E.C. base there.
NTHS: They have a lot of UFO stuff going on around Area
51.
BK: Oh yeah, 51 is a place where you don't want to be found at all. All
the guards carry submachine guns and they are told to shoot to kill if
anybody gets inside the base.
NTHS: So continuing on, Mr. Bill Kaysing, author of We
Never Went to the Moon, to prove that the moon landing
was faked, you mentioned that there were no stars in the
photos that the astronauts brought back, but also you
mentioned it was impossible for the United States of
America to actually make it to the moon at that time, that
there had been some problems, and that you were involved
with the program at this time, so you knew about those
problems.
BK: Oh yes. One of the major problems, of course, was trying to get
things to work in essentially an alien environment. Outer space is no
picnic. You've got the Van Allen belt around the Earth, you know,
about twenty miles up, the Van Allen belt would probably have cooked
any astronauts who ventured into that area. Then you've got outer
space where there are billions of micro meteorites zipping around at
speeds up to 60 000 miles per hour, and these would have gone right
through the command capsule with the astronauts in it, and kept right
on going, and these micro meteorites are all different sizes, from the
head of a pin to, say, the size of a grapefruit and larger.
NTHS: Weren't there actual events, though, that happened
to NASA that made them realize they couldn't send
somebody to the moon? When did NASA realize that it was
impossible for them to send somebody to the moon and
that they would have to fake the moon landing?
BK: Well, initially, they realized it in 1959 when I was privy to a study
made by the Russians. The Russians discovered that the radiation on
the moon would require astronauts to be clothed in four feet of lead to
avoid being killed. NASA picked up on this study and, of course, did
some studies of their own and, subsequently, other studies were made
about all of the different hazards on the moon, particularly something
as benign, you might think, as temperature. The temperature on the
moon during a lunar day is 250F. Now, trying to keep either the suits
or the lunar lander cool during that tremendous heat from a blazing
sun would have been impossible because they did not have enough air
conditioning power.
NTHS: So you're saying in 1959, the USA realized that they
couldn't put a man on the moon?
BK: That's when they got hold of the Russian studies. The Russians
never intended to land men on the moon. They concentrated on
unmanned vehicles. And the so-called space race was just a lot of
baloney.
NTHS: Well, Bill
Kaysing, what I don't understand is, ifP"8on`[205.229.196.3])
by Athens.4Link.Net (8.8.6/8.8.6) with ESMTP id TAA15852 for
BK: Aah...I would say that's - you're pretty close to that. A fellow by
the name of Gus Grissom was very disenchanted with the Apollo
program and he, on the day that he was burned to death, he hung a
lemon on the command capsule to let people know what he thought of
it. Prior to that, he made many trips to the rocket down in Downey
Plant to examine the equipment and he realized that it wasn't going to
work. A few minutes before he was burned to death, he said, hey, you
guys in the control center, get with it. You expect me to go to the
moon and you can't even maintain telephonic communications over
three miles. But my theory about Gus Grissom was that he was about
to blow the whistle on the entire project and that he was murdered.
NTHS: What was the intention of those astronauts - what
Apollo mission was that, the one that the guys died in?
BK: That was Apollo 1. Grissom and Chaffee and White, his two
companions, were supposed to take off in the fall of 1967 and go to
the moon.
NTHS: And what did NASA have for that, like, what was
going to be the plan? They were going to actually make it
to the moon? That was actually a moon flight?
BK: Mmm...no. Not really.
NTHS: What did NASA have planned? If NASA was faking
the whole moon program, what was going to happen to the
astronauts , what was their mission? What was NASA trying
to achieve or prove to the public?
BK: Well, by simulating a trip to the moon, they could easily then
justify the $30 billion that they spent. They intended to get Gus
Grissom, and Chaffee and White, to actually lie about their trips to
the moon, just like Armstrong and Aldrin and all the other astronauts
here lied about their trips to the moon. I call astronauts who allegedly
landed on the moon bald-faced liars, and particularly Alan Shephard.
NTHS: Why is that?
BK: Well, Alan Shephard is one of these particularly obnoxious
people. After Grissom was murdered, he refused to help Grissom's
wife, Betty Grissom, get a settlement from N.A.S.A and from North
American Aviation, which she held responsible. And Shephard didn't
approve of this at all. He said that we should accept the deaths of
astronauts and you don't need any money.
NTHS: So, Bill Kaysing, nobody ever landed on the moon,
right, Bill?
BK: That is absolutely correct. I will stake my life on it, and I have
many, many, many people who will support this view with technical
information, including a man who as at the Goldstone tracking station
during all of the Apollo flights and he is absolutely convinced that they
were faked.
NTHS: What, exactly, brought him to this decision?
BK: Well, he realized that all of the input to the Goldstone tracking
station came from NASA in Washington. Well, that certainly made it
convenient for them to fake any communications that they wished. In
other words, they were not picking up data from Apollo on its way to,
or on the moon, or on its way back. They were getting communications
from NASA Greenbelt in Washington, DC, which had complete
control of all the communications. And at this point I'd like to mention
that Walter Cronkite was the father figure that NASA chose to
essentially hype the whole project. Cronkite is a rather big liar.
NTHS: Well, he was in on the Kennedy thing, too, wasn't
he?
BK: Oh yeah. Recently, he did a film that completely disputed the
truth about the Kennedy assassination.
NTHS: What I'm still curious about, Bill Kaysing, is that -
did NASA kill those astronauts in 1967, did they kill them
on purpose because they knew too much? Or was it actually
an accident that happened?
BK: No, it was no accident. They murdered them because, you see, I
found out just recently that whenever NASA was in trouble they would
call on the CIA No we all know that the CIA has and can kill anybody
they want without any feeling of conscience whatsoever. So it's my
feeling that the CIA was hired by NASA to very adroitly kill Grissom,
Chaffee and White.
NTHS: Let's get a timeline here, Bill Kaysing. You're
working here with Rocketdyne, on the space program?
BK: I was working on the space program from 1957 to 1963.
NTHS: With probably a lot of ex-Nazis from the Ghelen
organization, I bet.
BK: Oh, I met some of them. There were a lot of Nazis including, of
course, Werner von Braun. And an interesting sideline is that, after
the Apollo project was over, he completely lost interest in space
travel, retired and went to work for Grumman, then he died of cancer.
This also evokes the recollection that, after Apollo 11 allegedly
returned to Earth, three of the leading NASA investigators resigned
without an explanation. Now this tells you that there were some men
of integrity who would not go along with this scam.
NTHS: So you're working at the rocket place developing,
working for the space program. You eventually leave the
space program. At that point, did you know that the moon
landings were going to be faked. 'Cause you said in 1959
the USA realized they couldn't put a man on the moon, so
they started faking stuff. Why didn't you spill the beans
right then?
BK: Well, I don't know. What motivated me to spill the beans was a
young man from the Vietnam wars by the name of John Grant. He
said that he was sent to Vietnam to kill people with no good reason
and he also got a heroin habit, and he says, "Bill," he says, "what I
want you to do is blow the whistle on this rotten, corrupt government."
He says, "Why don't you say something outrageous, like, we never
went to the moon?" So I attribute my interest in this project to John
Grant.
NTHS: If the moon landings were faked, why did they
continue faking the Apollo flights. Like, in the movie
Apollo 13 it points out that nobody really cared about the
space program at that point. You know, America had made
it to the moon, why continue faking moon landings if they
already made it to the moon?
BK: Well, the plan was to have something like eight or ten Apollo
flights to the moon and they had been given the money to build all the
vehicles to do it, and they felt obligated to carry on with the
simulation. But remember this - by the end of Apollo 12 people in
America, possibly elsewhere, were completely bored with the project.
So what they thought they would do, and did, was they would create a
cliffhanger. And Apollo 13, which didn't happen at all, despite the
movie, was simply a simulation inside of a simulation to get people's
interests back into the space program.
NTHS: Apollo 13 was
totally faked.
BK: Totally faked. It never
left the earth.
NTHS: The movie that
was up for nine Oscars™
never even happened.
BK: It never even happened.
NTHS: But that guy wrote such a realistic book.
BK: Well, sure. He's paid to write a realistic book. You know, many of
the Apollo astronauts have become multimillionaires. Where do you
suppose all that money came from?
NTHS: Well, why did they keep faking the Apollo flights, I
still don't understand. Did the Soviet Union know it was
faked? Why did they keep shut up if they knew it was
faked? 'Cause a lot of people would think they kept the
moon race going to prove the U.S. was better than the
Soviet Union. If the Soviet Union knew, why did they let
the U.S. get away with this?
BK: Well, I'll tell you - at the highest levels there is a coalition
between governments. In other words, the Soviets said, if you won't
tell on us - and they faked most of their space exploration flights - we
won't tell on you. It's as simple as that. See, what Apollo is, is the
beginning of the end of the ability of the government to hoodwink and
bamboozle and manipulate the people. More and more people are
becoming aware in the U.S. that the government is totally and
completely public enemy number one.
NTHS: Well, let's get a little bit more into the proving part
of We Never Went to the Moon, Bill. You mentioned before
that there were no stars in the photos. NASA says the
cameras weren't set properly - you say, well, they could
have been set properly, they just didn't do it properly.
There was no crater beneath the lunar lander. What's the
significance of that?
BK: Well, the significance is that the lunar lander engine developed
10 000 pounds of thrust and I've seen many, many rocket engines of
that capability in action and they are so powerful that they will move
giant rocks across the canyon. A 10 000 pound thrust engine would
have dug a hole right down to bedrock and it would have stirred up an
enormous cloud of dust, and that never appeared in any of the
so-called films that they took of the lunar landing. So, the absence of
the crater in any photograph of Apollo lunar landers is actually
probably the only real proof that you need. You don't need much
beyond that and the fact that there weren't any stars.
NTHS: What about the operation of the lunar module, in
the sense that it takes place thousands of miles above the
moon, this is what NASA says. The big explosion that
comes from the lunar module, when it lands on the moon,
it happens way up above the moon, and that's why there's
no crater. What about that explanation?
BK: Well, you know yourself that the lunar lander eventually had to,
according to NASA, land on the moon. Well, as it approached the
landing point, the engine still had to develop enough thrust to keep the
lunar lander, which weighs, in lunar gravity, about 3000 pounds, they
had to develop enough thrust to keep it floating above the surface in
order to let it gently land on the surface. But that obviously was not
substantiated by any crater under the lunar lander engine.
NTHS: Furthermore, the radiation should have turned the
astro-nots into crispy space bacon.
BK: Yes, it would have. And it also would have pierced them with
thousands of micro meteorites. The moon is not a place for human
beings, ever.
NTHS: And Russia did a study in about '59, and this is
what the U.S. picked up on, when the U.S. realized in '59
they couldn't go to the moon because the radiation was so
bad - is there any background for this, are there any
records that prove this, about the radiation out there in
space?
BK: Well, I think any good astro-physicist could give you all the data,
because it's been pretty well documented by studies. It's not hard to
find basic information on flights in outer space, and what you'd come
across when you do investigate it is how hostile the universe really is
once you leave the Earth's protective atmosphere.
NTHS: Do you believe that rockets ever made orbit; did
Surveyor or Pioneer actually happen?
BK: Possibly. Possibly not. I'm not absolutely certain about that. I will
concede that certain unmanned vehicles might have made it to the
moon. The Russians are supposed to have sent some unmanned
vehicles to the moon. And possibly our Surveyor did land on the moon.
But units with people in them, never.
NTHS: How 'bout any actual atmosphere, like John Glenn
in space, Yuri Gargarin - were they actually in space?
BK: I doubt it.
NTHS: So the Soviet Union faked that Yuri Gargarin was in
space, and that dog that died, Laika, really didn't die?
BK: Mmm...I don't think he was up there. See, there was a fellow by
the name of Lloyd Mallin in the early '70s who wrote a very detailed
book saying that all - well, nearly all - possibly all of the Soviet space
exploits were faked, and he proved it with photographs and technical
data and so forth. I still have a copy of that book.
NTHS: So continuing on with reasons that we didn't make
it to the moon here - there were various lighting anomalies?
BK: Oh, a lot of lighting anomalies. Some friends from Europe came
over recently and what they did, they're very interested in this
project, they analyzed NASA films supposedly taken on the moon,
frame by frame. And you know what they found out?
NTHS: What, Bill Kaysing, author of We Never Went to the
Moon?
BK: Shadows diverged. In other words, if you have a point source of
light, like the Sun, and you can see this anytime outdoors, all shadows
will parallel - telephone poles, trees, you name it - all the shadows will
be parallel. Well, these men found, in analyzing frame by frame
movies, that there was more than one lighting source for this film.
Now that proves beyond any doubt, in my mind, that these pictures,
these motion pictures, were taken inside of a movie set, using gigantic
spotlights to simulate the Sun. But because they would pan shots and
show, like, the Rover or astronauts running around and so forth, if you
analyze them frame by frame, you find out that the shadows are not
parallel. This, to me, is one of the most significant breakthroughs, and
I only learned it about two months ago.
NTHS: Well how 'bout NASA countering that - they say
that in some pictures astronauts are lit from more than one
side because the sunlight is reflected off the lunar surface,
or off the lunar vehicle.
BK: Very unlikely in a vacuum, because light doesn't go around
corners unless it's assisted. If you look at NASA pictures allegedly
taken on the moon, all of the potholes, the little mini craters and so
forth, have completely black shadows. Well, any picture of any device
on the moon should have had completely black shadows where the
Sun did not illuminate them.
NTHS: How about the pictures of the moon where there are
curves in the moon, how did they achieve that if they faked
the moon landing, Bill Kaysing?
BK: Oh, well - when I was in Frankfurt, Germany recently I saw about
a six-foot diameter moon, a model, and it was absolutely perfect. So
all the NASA people had to do was create a model of the moon and
they could shoot any curvature they wanted.
NTHS: Did people see Apollo 11 take off?
BK: Well, yes, certainly.
NTHS: So what happened, then, if they saw it take off? The
rocket took off - if we didn't go to the moon, what actually
happened when Apollo 11 took off?
BK: The Apollo 11 vehicle, or Saturn 5, was sent out of people's sight,
and then it was jettisoned into the South Atlantic, where all of the six
that were launched now reside. There were no astronauts, of course,
on board. They were hidden away carefully, to be returned, allegedly
in their command capsule, by being dumped out of a C5A transport
plane. It was easy to do all of this, because they had total control of
everything.
NTHS: So they were not on the rocket when it took off,
then?
BK: No, they were not.
NTHS: And then they were picked up - now, you talked to a
pilot who saw all this happen?
BK: Yes, a pilot came on the air when I was doing a broadcast and he
says, "Bill, I agree with you 100%. I was flying from San Francisco to
Tokyo and I saw, along with several passengers, a command capsule
dropped out of a C5A and the red-and-white candy-striped parachutes
opened and it descended to the surface of the ocean."
NTHS: And what happened then?
BK: Well, they were of course picked up and put into biological suits
so they wouldn't afflict anybody with moon germs, but my theory on
that is they couldn't tell these big bald-faced lies this early. So they
were actually kept from the press for approximately a month until
they could sort of reconcile themselves with telling a lot of big lies.
NTHS: No, but I'm just curious, Apollo 11 takes off, the
rocket dumps in the South Atlantic - what happens then,
are the astronauts just hiding somewhere, and then
eventually they get on a plane and jump out of the plane
and they've landed - that was it?
BK: That is correct.
NTHS: No moon involved at all.
BK: No moon involved at all. I am 100% positive of this, and every
day when I get information from people who support my views, I'm
more convinced than ever.
NTHS: How did they make the astronauts float, Bill
Kaysing, 'cause it seems pretty convincing when you seen
them floating around there. Like, a lot of people when you
say, "hey, you know, we never went to the moon", they
went, "I saw it! I saw them floating there! I saw them on the
moon right there!"
BK: Well, that could have been done just like they did the Broadway
play Peter Pan. In other words, [they] used wires and suspended the
astronauts from an overhead crane and had them leap gaily across
what actually was a moon set. No, it's not difficult to show astronauts
taking big leaps, nor is it difficult, for example, to put them in a
simulated command capsule and have them go through an anti-gravity
curve.
NTHS: Another point here is that the moon rocks were
fake. Are the moon rocks real?
BK: No, they are not real. NASA has a well-developed ceramics
laboratory with high-temperature ovens -
NTHS: That's another way NASA could prove they went to
the moon, 'cause they brought back these rocks.
Interestingly enough, at the University of British Columbia
here, David Strangway, the President of U.B.C., was the guy
in charge of inspecting the moon rocks.
BK: OK, fine, why don't you call him up and ask him what he thinks
about them.
NTHS: So what happened, the moon rocks were not real?
BK: No, they were manufactured on Earth to look like moon rocks,
but since nobody has any moon rocks to compare them with, it's very
simple to make up a moon rock and say, hey, this came from the
moon.
NTHS: Well, how would you know it is a moon rock? Like,
how do you know it's not a moon rock - how do you know
it's a fake?
BK: I had a Seattle geologist who examined moon rocks and he said,
"There's no question, Bill, that these rocks were made in a laboratory
on Earth."
NTHS: The actual astronauts had strange language as well.
I know this from your book and also some other articles,
like Houston Control said, "Well, it's a good show", and
then the command service module replied, "Fantastic", and
then Armstrong replied, "Yeah, I'll second that." Like,
well, it's a good show. That was interesting language.
BK: Yes, and you can find a little more of that in an article published
in a magazine called Wired, published in September of 1994. [It's a]
4000-word article by Rogier van Bakel, essentially on my contentions.
NTHS: Bill, has anybody ever seen the studio that this was
faked in? 'Cause it's in Area 51, which you alluded to. It
was also alluded to in the films Diamonds are Forever and
Capricorn One?
BK: Yes, that's right. They did allude to the sound stage, or the
hidden moon set. No, the reason no one has ever seen it and come out
alive is that they don't intend for anybody to see it and come out alive.
You’ve got to remember that NASA is kind of a lethal organization.
Jim Irwin - Apollo 15 - was put up to blowing the whistle on the whole
project and he called me up, ostensibly to give me the facts. Few days
later he died of a heart attack. Now what does that tell you?
NTHS: Well, a lot of people died when dissing NASA
What's the significance of the Baron Report?
BK: Oh, that's profound. A man named Thomas Ronald Baron was an
inspector on Pad 34, where Grissom, Chaffee and White were
murdered. He brought forth a 500-page report on the
mismanagement, the incompetence of NASA and North American
[Aviation]. And again, like Jim Irwin, a few days after he testified
before the Congressional Investigating Committee, he was found dead
in his car at a railroad crossing. Now what does that tell you?
NTHS: A lot of people got knocked off.
BK: NASA and the CIA and the whole U.S. government is a rotten
and corrupt organization, designed just to get all the tax money they
can out of people, to manipulate their minds, to keep them amused
with sporting events and silly TV sitcoms. We, unfortunately, in the
U.S. are pretty well brainwashed, believing whatever the government
says. And they have control, as you well know, of the media.
NTHS: How much space stuff since 1959 has been real?
What space stuff is real today? Did the Challenger blow up?
Did NASA know it would blow up?
BK: Yeah, and you know why it blew up? Because Christa McAuliffe,
the only civilian and only woman aboard, refused to go along with the
lie that you couldn't see stars in space. So they blew her up, along with
six other people, to keep that lie under wraps. I claim that Christa
McAuliffe was murdered.
NTHS: So when the Challenger blew up, it wasn't because
of O-ring problems, it was because NASA murdered the
people because they didn't want to go along with the gags?
BK: Well, Christa McAuliffe was a woman of great integrity, and she
would not agree to say that you couldn't see stars in space.
NTHS: So, Bill Kaysing, are you saying that Roberta
Bondar, Canada's first women astronaut, never actually
made it in space, 'cause she was on the Shuttle.
BK: Well, I'll tell you what - the Shuttle is a possibility. After all, it's
low altitude. I haven't done a great deal of research on the Shuttle,
but several people have said that the Shuttle is actually faked, also.
NTHS: So Christa McAuliffe refused to say that she
couldn't see stars in space, which would have verified the
moon landing claim of no stars in the photos in the moon,
so they blew her up.
BK: Yeah, exactly. Once you start telling lies, you've gotta keep on
going. And then, of course, you try to cover up lies, like the film
Apollo 13.
NTHS: Which, I'm sure, is not on your favorite flicks list
for this year, right?
BK: I've seen it, and I examined it very carefully, and I found a
tremendous anomaly in it. They show the exhaust of the lunar lander
model engine as being a yellow-gold. Well, the fuels used on the lunar
module were nitrogen tetroxide and asymmetrical dimetal hydrazine,
which produce an opaque red gas. So their technical experts on Apollo
13 weren't really with it.
NTHS: So, who else is gonna get murdered, what else is
coming up? What's the future? What is real that's in space
that we can see out there, Bill Kaysing?
BK: Well, I would say this, that the number of people that believe my
version of Apollo are increasing in great numbers. I had a fellow come
up from LA He borrowed all of my papers, materials, video and film
and so forth, went back and did an hour-and-a-half tape on We Never
Went to the Moon. The book is being translated into German and
Italian in Europe. I've had inquiries from Australia, from Hawaii, from
essentially all over the world. And all of them are highly supportive
and have given me a lot of brand-new information which I never knew
before. So my feeling is that, within a short time, the Apollo hoax will
be exposed and that will open Pandora's box. After that, the U.S.
government is going to be hard-pressed to keep the lies about the
Federal Reserve Bank, about the IRS being the Gestapo of America,
about the fact that all silver was taken out of circulation in 1963, the
fact that Canada does not import our meat because it's so full of
rotten chemicals. I'm sure you knew that. The Canadians are pretty
smart, because they don't import American meat. So, you see, in this
country, we're at the short end of things because of the corruption of
the government.
NTHS: There are some people who believe that the moon
landing was faked because the U.S. government didn't want
to disclose that they'd been on the moon since 1910!
BK: No. My feeling is that no human being has ever landed on the
moon, because of the lethal environment on the surface.
NTHS: How do you deal with people who you're trying to convince?
Isn't it like trying to convince people that the Earth is flat? How do
you distinguish yourself with these people, Bill Kaysing?
BK: Well, it's easy. I've got the proof. I've got the photographs, which
are availabqA$…P"84link.net) ,šPG€ dy. If you look at the
pictures taken of Aldrin by Armstrong, you can find so many mistakes
in those photographs that anybody in his right mind would realize, just
by those photos alone, that they were faked.
NTHS: Well, how did the media fall for this?
BK: Well, the media doesn't fall for anything. The media is controlled
by the government. The Dutch papers on July 21 [1969] said that the
moon landing was a hoax, was a fake, and I have been unable to find
any of those Dutch papers, although it's well documented that they did
publish information, with proof, that the U.S. was spoofing everybody.
NTHS: Didn't the National Inquirer have stuff, too?
BK: Well, I did send some of my material to one of their subsidiaries,
called The Weekly World News, and they did a marvelous job of
presenting my material. It was extremely accurate. So, I've been in
newspapers, I've been on Oprah Winfrey's show, and quite a number
of leading television shows.
NTHS: What did Oprah want from you?
BK: Well, she wanted me to talk about the moon book. I did that July
5, 1981 in Baltimore, Maryland.
NTHS: Have you ever talked to any astronauts at all?
BK: Oh yes. I've talked to Edwin 'Buzz' Aldrin. I was invited to
appear on CBS television in Los Angeles with Colonel Aldrin. And
they called him up, and he wouldn't appear with me. So I called him
up, and I said, "Buzz, why don't you appear with me?" And his exact
words were, "That is something I do not want to do," and he hung up.
Now if, in reality, they had gone to the moon, wouldn't they put me on
the air with a genuine astronaut, and let me debate with him. You've
got to remember, too, that Neil Armstrong has not given more than
three interviews since he allegedly returned from the moon. A friend
of mine went to see him, to question him, and he not only refused to
talk to him, he said, "If you hang around my farm much longer, I'll call
the police." Now, here's the most famous man of the twentieth
century, Neil Armstrong, allegedly set foot on the moon, July 21, 1969
- why won't he talk about it?
NTHS: Maybe he's just tired of talking about it.
BK: No, he couldn't be tired of talking about it, because it's his duty
and obligation to be a national hero. He took NASA’s money, he was
supported by the government for many, many years, and here he is, in
a position of, let's say, talking about Apollo in a very convincing way,
but he won't talk at all. Now, he lives on a farm in Ohio, near
Columbus. Anybody can find his address and go see him.
NTHS: Bill Kaysing, you've been trying to prove that we
never went to the moon for twenty years now. What new
information have you garnered?
BK: Well, as I said, most recently the divergent shadows. Ralph Rene
has done a very comprehensive study on temperatures on the moon.
He's proved that, in no way could the lunar lander, where Aldrin and
Armstrong slept, have been cooled down, because they did not have
the power. What's happening now is that a lot of technical information
is coming on stream. Also, I'm on the Internet, and my book's on the
Internet, and I'm now getting 'phone calls from many different people
who believe in my contention that Apollo was a hoax, and they have
contributed a lot to the body of information that I have managed to
acquire.
NTHS: Is there any way of going to the Smithsonian in
Washington and looking at the stuff and seeing that it is
fake?
BK: Oh, yeah. One of my friends went to the Smithsonian and he
measured the exit door of the lunar lander and found out that
astronauts wearing their life-support systems could not have gone out
that door, they were too big.
NTHS: And all this was faked somewhere in the desert.
BK: Well, either in the desert and/or Norton Air Force Base. I
suspect that a lot of the real fine photography and action was done at
Norton, where they were able to create what appeared to be solar
lighting. That was one of the most difficult things to do, was to
simulate the Sun, 'cause the Sun's light is so glaring, so powerful, that
it would have taken a tremendous arc lamp to simulate the Sun. And
they could have actually created a vacuum inside the sound stage.
See, if you have $30 billion, it's no problem to do just about anything
you want, including murder people, eliminate anybody who comes on
stream and tells opposing stories. I have been invited to talk on radio
many times, and I have been immediately discredited.
NTHS: In what sense?
BK: Well, for example, Chuck Ashman in LA called me and he said,
"I understand you say we never went to the moon." And I said, "Yes,
and here's my proof." Well, he clicked me off and said, "Well this is
what I call an irresponsible journalist, a man who has no real proof
that we didn't go to the moon, but he's running around telling people
that it was all a hoax."
NTHS: Are there any other points that we haven't [covered]
here today, Bill Kaysing, about not making to the moon,
more proof?
BK: Well, I think we've covered the very important general ones.
There are a lot of details. For example, Edwin Aldrin, when he came
back from his alleged trip to the moon, wrote a book called Return to
Earth. Well, I've read the book three times, and in it we find a man
who is trying desperately to tell the truth, but he's unable to. In other
words, they put the wraps on him, they told him, don't ever talk about
the moon as a fake. But an interesting thing happened to Aldrin when
he was speaking at Edwards Air Force Base to some of his fellow
pilots, he was asked by a TV interrogator, "What was it like to be on
the moon?" And Edwin Aldrin at that point could not answer that
question. he began shaking and trembling, he walked off the stage
into an alley and later got drunk. Now, if you'd done something,
honestly and truthfully, you can talk about it without any problems.
Well, it was obvious that, here was an occasion when Aldrin could not
tell that lie one more time.
NTHS: Have you been threatened at all, Bill Kaysing.
BK: Oh, death threats and letters with skull and crossbones on them.
I've been called a Commie sympathizer, a traitor to the United States.
Many things have happened to me. One time I was on KOME radio
doing a three-hour show, and half-way through the show someone
dropped napalm on the transmitter in the Gilroy Hills. They wanted to
cut our story off. Police came, they offered us police protection, and
KOME was off the air for three days until they could a quarter of a
million dollars' damage.
NTHS: Boy, Americans really care about the moon landing,
don't they?
BK: Oh yeah. Well, it's like Pearl Harbor. They managed to cover up
the truth at Pearl Harbor since December 7, 1941. Everybody that
was in W.W.II, including me, knows that the Japanese were set up to
do it. In fact, some people told me that two shiploads of gold were sent
to Japan to finance Pearl Harbor, they were sent by the British. So
the British wanted us involved in the war and Pearl Harbor seemed
like a good way to do it.
NTHS: So the Americans bribed the Japanese into bombing
Pearl Harbor?
BK: Yes, and Roosevelt not only knew about the attack, he helped
arrange it, and he suppressed the information about the Japanese
attacks from Kimmel and Short, the naval and army commanders at
Pearl Harbor. This was one of the biggest hoaxes perpetrated by the
U.S. government to get us involved in a deadly war. There's no
question that it was all set up.
NTHS: If people want to get a hold of you, Bill Kaysing,
what is your address?
BK: PO Box 832, Soquel, CA, 95073 and I would be happy to
correspond with Canadians about these subjects at length.
NTHS: Why should people care about the moon landing,
Bill Kaysing, why should people care that the moon landing
was faked?
BK: Well, I think we should care because it proves that the U.S.
government is just a body politic of lies and falsehoods. They have
been for many, many years on all of the important subjects. Social
Security is bankrupt, the food in America is all weak poisons, people
are put under the thumb of the IRS There are so many things wrong
with the U.S. Now, don't get me wrong, I don't dislike the people - it's
the government that I call public enemy number one.
NTHS: Anything else you'd like to add to the people out
there?
BK: Well, I'll say this - whether you believe my story or not, go to the
library in your spare time and take a look at some N.A.S.A books and
study the photographs, use your own intelligence to analyze them and
see that they could not have been taken on the moon. That's the
number one proof.
NTHS: All right, Bill, keep on rocking in the free world and
doot doodle oot do-
BK: What's that?
NTHS: Bill, doot doodle
oot do -
BK: Ha, ha - whatever. I'll
take it easy.
NTHS: No, doot doodle
oot do -
BK: Doot do