Moon, life on

Among ancient philosophers to speculate about possible lunar inhabitants were Anaxagoras, Xenophanes, Pythagoras and his followers, Plutarch, and (in fiction) Lucian. In the late middle ages, Nicholas of Cusa favored life on the Moon. However, speculation became more intense following the Copernican Revolution and Galileo's first lunar studies with the aid of a telescope (1608). In his Discovery of a New World in the Moone (1638), John Wilkins summarized what were then widely held beliefs:

That those spots and brighter parts which by our sight might be distinguished in the Moon, do show the difference between the Sea and Land of that other World... The spots represent the Sea, and the brighter parts Land... That there are high mountains, deep valleys, and spacious plains in the body of the Moon... That there is an atmosphere, or an orb of gross vaporous air, immediately encompassing the body of the Moon... That it is probable there may be inhabitants in this other World, but of what kind they are is uncertain...

Even at this early stage, however, there was sharp disagreement over how to interpret what the telescope showed. The two great lunar map-makers of the seventeenth century, Johannes Hevelius and Giovanni Riccioli, stood at opposite poles of the debate. Whereas Hevelius populated his chart with seas and "selenites" (as he called his lunar inhabitants), Riccioli's Moon was dry and dead. The battle over lunar life continued throughout the eighteenth century, Johann Bode and William Herschel being notable among the pro-selenites. 

By the turn of the nineteenth century, persuasive evidence was accumulating that the Moon lacked both sufficient air and water to support substantial life. Yet still the selenites had their champions, including the extremists Schröter and Gruithuisen, and the moderates Gauss, von Littrow, and Olbers. Improved lunar maps in the 1830s, by Wilhelm Lohrmann and by Beer and Mädler, helped persuade most astronomers that the Moon was unlikely to be inhabited. Even so, this did not prevent Richard Locke from creating a worldwide sensation in 1835 with his great "Moon Hoax". 

By the end of the 19th century, lunar life had passed more or less from the realm of science into that of science fiction. Jules Verne posed the question in Around the Moon (1870) and teased with his reply, George Griffith's adventurers in Stories of Other Worlds (1900) find the ruins of a civilization and its bestial offspring, while, as late as 1901, in The First Men in the Moon, H. G. Wells was able to exploit lingering public credulity with his tale of a hollow Moon, richly varied selenites, and massively cerebral Grand Lunar. 

And yet the romance did not quite end with these gaslight fantasies. In the 1920s, William H. Pickering, a staunch advocate of Martian vegetation, argued that certain dark areas on the Moon which changed shape were due to spreading plants,1 while almost half a century later the remote possibility of microbial lunar life was still on the minds of NASA scientists when they quarantined the first Apollo astronauts and their rock samples – a well-advised (but, in the event, ill-performed) precaution in view of the bacterial survivors found on the returned camera of Surveyor 3. Arthur C. Clarke suggested remains of another kind on the Moon in his short story The Sentinel 2 which blossomed into 2001: A Space Odyssey

In reality, it seems, the Moon has always been dead. However, the prospects for future intelligent (human) life on our nearest neighbor have been greatly improved by the discovery of billions of tons of ice in some deep lunar craters.

 References 

1. Pickering, W. H. "Eratosthenes," 1 to 6, Popular Astronomy, nos. 269, 287, 312, and 317 (1919-25).

2. Clarke, Arthur C. "The Sentinel." In Expedition to Earth. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World (1970).


Moon, water on 
 
The belief that the dark lunar areas, or maria, might be seas was held by Plutarch and others in the ancient world. In his Siderius Nunctius, Galileo wrote that " ... [the] brighter part most fitly represents its land surface, but its darker part the watery surface ..." Later, he came to doubt this interpretation, but others, including Wilkins, Hevelius, Schröter, and William Herschel kept the idea of a maritime Moon alive for the next two centuries. The demise of lunar water accompanied that of a lunar atmosphere, since liquid water cannot exist where the atmospheric pressure is extremely low or zero. Ice, however, does exist in regions at the Moon's poles. This surprising fact, first suggested by data from the Clementine probe, in 1994, was confirmed, in March 1998, by observations made by Lunar Prospector. After further analysis,1 the initial conservative estimate of 300 million tons was increased by a factor of 10, to 3 billion tons at each pole, enough to fill a lake about 100 meters deep and 6 km across. The possibility also exists that there may be more. The instrument aboard Lunar Prospector used for this determination can detect the presence of water (or, more precisely, hydrogen) to a depth of 0.5 meter. Since lunar soil has been turned over by meteorite impacts during the past couple of billion years to a depth of about 2 meters, water could theoretically be present to this depth. However, if (as suspected) this water exists as crystals mixed in with the lunar regolith, larger amounts of pure water ice deposits could potentially exist at much greater depths. 

 
The lunar ice is thought to have come from comets which collided with the Moon in the remote past. Although most of the water deposited on the lunar surface in this way would have been vaporized long ago by the daytime heat of the Sun, in small, permanently shaded regions at the poles it has evidently survived. Its presence is further evidence that water, frozen or otherwise, is a common commodity on many worlds, and this, in turn, raises the prospects for extraterrestrial life. The availability of water on the Moon is also a major boost to any plans for establishing a self-sustaining lunar colony. 

 
References 

 
Feldman, W. C., Maurice, S., Binder, A. B., Barraclough, B. L., Elphic, R. C., and Lawrence, D. J. "Fluxes of Fast and Epithermal Neutrons from Lunar Prospector: Evidence for Water Ice at the Lunar Poles," Science, 281, 1496 (1998).

 


"Moon Hoax"

There are two "Moon hoaxes." The first, sometimes referred to as the "Great Moon Hoax," was perpetrated in 1835 by Richard Adams Locke, a writer hired by the newly established New York Sun. Having already dabbled in science fiction, it occurred to him to expand his activity in this direction without actually telling anyone. For his subject, he chose the astronomical expedition of John Herschel to the Cape of Good Hope. Beginning with the Aug. 25, 1835 issue of the Sun, Locke describes in detail all kinds of fantastic discoveries having been made by Herschel with a telescope of such power, he said, that it could see objects on the lunar surface as small as 18 inches across.

In the second instalment, the exotic variety of life supposedly found by Herschel is revealed, including a goatlike animal with a single horn and "an amphibious creature of spherical form, which rolled with great velocity across the pebbly beach."

Huge interest was created by the articles and, briefly, the Sun became the best-selling newspaper in the world. 'The New York Times' believed the reports both "probable and possible", the 'New Yorker' thought they heralded "a new era in astronomy", Yale was said to be "alive with staunch supporters", while, according to another report, an American clergyman considered starting a collection for Bibles for the lunar inhabitants.

The fact that the "Moon Hoax" was almost certainly nothing of the kind has been argued compellingly by Michael Crowe who cites an account of the affair written by William Griggs in 1852. According to Griggs:

We have the assurance of the author, in a letter published some years since, in the New World, that it was written expressly to satirize the unwarranted and extravagant anticipations upon this subject....

Yet, the irony is, the hoax failed because the public had been primed for so long by the strident advocates of pluralism to expect intelligent life on other worlds.

The second "Moon hoax" is the more modern claim that the Apollo missions never landed on the Moon. Sadly, this is born of the same kind of scientific ignorance and naïveté that allowed Locke's tale to take root. It may seem incredible that, in the 21st century, a considerable number of people in developed nations, notably the USA, could entertain the notion that men have not visited the Moon.

This silly scenario was given unnecessary (but, doubtless, commercially successful) support, in February 2001, by a prime-time Fox TV special, "Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon?" Amateur theorists were allowed to parade such easily-countered objections as "Why are there no stars in the pictures sent back from the Moon?" (Answer: If the cameras had been adjusted to pick up the stars, the surface would have appeared dazzlingly bright).

Unfortunately, NASA may have compounded the problem in 2002 by budgeting $15,000 to hire a former rocket scientist, James Oberg, to produce a small book refuting the disbelievers' claims (primarily for the benefit of teachers and students) but then backing away from the project for fear that it would lend credibility to, as NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe put it, "something that is, on its face, asinine." However, there remains a need, especially in the United States, to counter scientific illiteracy and the growing belief in pseudoscience of all descriptions, including creationism.

While attending the Cape Canaveral premiere of the IMAX version of Apollo 13 in November 2002, Tom Hanks said the film industry had a responsibility to promote historical literacy. He took a jab at the 1978 movie Capricorn One, which had NASA's first manned mission to Mars being faked on a sound stage.

He said:

We live in a society where there is no law in making money in the promulgation of ignorance or, in some cases, stupidity.

Of course, there will always be those who remain unconvinced. But it is important for the future, and for the education of young people who may be easily influenced by nonsensical but sensational claims, that the scientific record is set straight.


References

Evans, David S. The Great Moon Hoax, Sky & Telescope, 196 (September 1981) and 308 (October 1981).



We Never Went to the Moon

It’s all true. We never went to the Moon. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin never set foot on Mare Tranquilitatus. They filmed it all on a soundstage in Nevada’s Area 51. Stanley Kubrick directed, slowing down the film speed to make it look like the astronauts were walking in low gravity. He used the same techniques he developed for his movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, which “coincidentally” came out in 1968, the same year that NASA claimed to send Apollo 8 around the moon. But Kubrick was forced to do it, and so he left clues in the photographs. If you look at them closely you can see that some of the shadows do not match up and there are other inconsistencies. The flags wave when there is no air. There are no blast craters under the lunar landers. Kubrick was a master filmmaker and he would not have been so sloppy with his art—he would have put the blast craters there and he would not have allowed the flags to wave. But perhaps he was trying to tell us something, provided we are smart enough to recognize it. Maybe that is why he died under mysterious circumstances in 1999.

President John F. Kennedy announced the lunar goal in 1961. But NASA scientists quickly realized that traveling to the moon is impossible. The Van Allen radiation belts will kill anybody who tries to reach the moon. NASA officials knew this early on and realized that they would have to fake it. In fact, one of the reasons that the CIA, Lyndon Johnson, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the military-industrial complex, and the Knights Templar had John F. Kennedy killed was because Kennedy was about to cancel the Apollo program. Too many people were going to make too much money from faking the lunar program, so Apollo had to continue. Oliver Stone knew it. He even mentioned it in his movie JFK. And he has hardly worked since then. That is not a coincidence.

Lyndon Johnson knew that he had to get somebody competent to run the lunar hoax project, so he recruited the same person who told Franklin Roosevelt in November 1941 that the Japanese were planning to bomb Pearl Harbor. This man—we’ll call him Mr. X—had previously helped Johnson fake the Gulf of Tonkin Incident and can be seen in photos of the grassy knoll in Dallas, carrying an umbrella. He worked as the executive secretary for MAJESTIC-12. For the lunar hoax project Mr. X recruited a number of people from the Philadelphia Experiment. The Brown and Root Company (now Halliburton) built the soundstages.

Of course it is ironic that the Americans had to fake the moon landings, because they already had access to the flying saucer technology recovered at Roswell in 1947.

We now know from reputable sources that the Soviets were about to upstage the American Apollo 8 and Apollo 11 missions by sending cosmonauts to orbit the moon. But their rockets failed, which some people believe is even more proof that it is impossible to send people to the moon. Unfortunately, the Soviet Union lacked the filmmaking technology of the United States and they were unable to fake their own moon missions. But they did find out about the American deception and blackmailed the United States into shipping them millions of tons of grain to buy their silence. Yuri Gagarin found out about this plan, which is why the KGB had him killed. Why else would the United States prevent its adversary from starving except to keep them silent about a major scandal?

Of course it is ironic that the Americans had to fake the moon landings, because they already had access to the flying saucer technology recovered at Roswell in 1947. The three alien pilots all died and were dissected at Wright Patterson Air Force Base, but the flying disc was relatively intact. Unfortunately, the Air Force was not able to successfully copy the disc’s power source, which used a form of Zero Point Energy that the Nazis had tried to perfect. After nearly two decades of trying, the project was finally shelved until the technology was later revived in the 1980s and successfully used to power the Aurora spyplane during test flights in the Bermuda Triangle. Some of the flying disc technology was used in the Stealth Bomber. By an amazing coincidence, the same hangar at Area 51 that for years housed the alien craft was used as the soundstage for the faked moon landings.


Is there an "Alien Base" on the Moon? More and more people are coming forward with stories of an Alien presence on the Moon. Rumors say that there is an Alien Moon Base on the far side of the moon, the side we never see from Earth.

Did you ever wonder why the Moon landings stopped and why we have not tried to build a Moon Base? It does seem like a better and easier idea than a floating space station with no access to any raw materials or supplies? According to the NASA Astronaut Neil Armstrong the Aliens have a base on the Moon and told us in no uncertain terms to get off and stay off the Moon!

Sound far fetched?

Milton Cooper a Naval Intelligence Officer tell us that not only does the Alien Moon Base exist but the U.S. Naval Intelligence Community refers to the Alien Moon Base as "Luna", that there is a huge mining operation going on there, and that is where the Aliens keep their huge mother ships while the trips to Earth are made in smaller "flying saucers".

“LUNA: The Alien base on the far side of the Moon. It was seen and filmed by the Apollo Astronauts. A base, a mining operation using very large machines, and the very large alien craft described in sighting reports as mother ships exist there.”

~Milton Cooper in Apollo 11 Encounter UFOs on the Moon? from the Book "Above Top Secret" by Timothy Good

Did Apollo 11 Encounter UFOs on the Moon?
from the Book "Above Top Secret"
by Timothy Good

According to hitherto unconfirmed reports, both Neil Armstrong and Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin saw UFOs shortly after that historic landing on the Moon in Apollo 11 on 21 July 1969. I remember hearing one of the astronauts refer to a "light" in or on a carter during the television transmission, followed by a request from mission control for further information. Nothing more was heard.

According to a former NASA employee Otto Binder, unnamed radio hams with their own VHF receiving facilities that bypassed NASA's broadcasting outlets picked up the following exchange:

NASA: What's there? Mission Control calling Apollo 11...

Apollo: These "Babies" are huge, Sir! Enormous! OH MY GOD! You wouldn't believe it! I'm telling you there are other spacecraft out there, Lined up on the far side of the crater edge! They're on the Moon watching us!

In 1979 Maurice Chatelain, former chief of NASA Communications Systems confirmed that Armstrong had indeed reported seeing two UFOs on the rim of a crater. "The encounter was common knowledge in NASA," he revealed, "but nobody has talked about it until now."

Soviet scientists were allegedly the first to confirm the incident. "According to our information, the encounter was reported immediately after the landing of the module," said Dr. Vladimir Azhazha, a physicist and Professor of Mathematics at Moscow University. "Neil Armstrong relayed the message to Mission Control that two large, mysterious objects were watching them after having landed near the moon module. But his message was never heard by the public - because NASA censored it."

According to another Soviet scientist, Dr. Aleksandr Kazantsev, Buss Aldrin took color movie film of the UFOs from inside the module, and continued filming them after he and Armstrong went outside. Dr. Azhazha claims that the UFOs departed minutes after the astronauts came out on to the lunar surface.

Maurice Chatelain also confirmed that Apollo 11's radio transmissions were interrupted on several occasions in order to hide the news from the public. Before dismissing Chatelain's sensational claims, it is worth noting his impressive background in the aerospace industry and space program. His first job after moving from France was as an electronics engineer with Convair, specializing in telecommunications, telemetry and radar. In 1959 he was in charge of an electromagnetic research group, developing new radar and telecommunications systems for Ryan. One of his eleven patents was an automatic ãflights to the Moon. Later, at North American Aviation, Chatelain was offered the job of designing and building the Apollo communications and data-processing systems.

Chatelain claims that "all Apollo and Gemini flights were followed, both at a distance and sometimes also quite closely, by space vehicles of extraterrestrial origin - flying saucers, or UFOs, if you want to call them by that name. Every time it occurred, the astronauts informed Mission Control, who then ordered absolute silence." He goes on to say:

“I think that Walter Schirra aboard Mercury 8 was the first of the astronauts to use the code name 'Santa Claus' to indicate the presence of flying saucers next to space capsules. However, his announcements were barely noticed by the general public. It was a little different when James Lovell on board the Apollo 8 command module came out from behind the moon and said for everybody to hear: 'PLEASE BE INFORMED THAT THERE IS A SANTA CLAUS.' Even though this happened on Christmas Day 1968, many people sensed a hidden meaning in those words.”

Rumors persist. NASA may well be a civilian agency, but many of its programs are funded by the defense budget and most of the astronauts are subject to military security regulations. Apart from the fact that the National Security Agency screens all films and probably radio communications as well. We have the statements by Otto Binder, Dr. Garry Henderson and Maurice Chatelain that the astronauts were under strict orders not to discuss their sightings. And Gordon Cooper has testified to a United Nations committee that one of the astronauts actually witnessed a UFO on the ground. If there is no secrecy, why has this sighting not been made public?

A certain professor, who wished to remain anonymous, was engaged in a discussion with Neil Armstrong during a NASA symposium.

Professor: What REALLY happened out there with Apollo 11?

Armstrong: It was incredible, of course we had always known there was a possibility, the fact is, we were warned off! (by the Aliens). There was never any question then of a space station or a moon city.

Professor: How do you mean "warned off"?

Armstrong: I can't go into details, except to say that their ships were far superior to ours both in size and technology - Boy, were they big!...and menacing! No, there is no question of a space station.

Professor: But NASA had other missions after Apollo 11?

Armstrong: Naturally - NASA was committed at that time, and couldn't risk panic on Earth. But it really was a quick scoop and back again.

Armstrong confirmed that the story was true but refused to go into further detail, beyond admitting that the CIA was behind the cover-up.

(thanks to BBS)

More information: Sensation: Cities Found on the Moon!

Reasonable activity of an alien civilization showed up unexpectedly close to us. We were not ready for it psychologically

We still can come across publications trying to find an answer to the question: Are we alone in the universe? At the same time, presence of reasonable creatures has been detected just close to our home, in the Moon. However, the discovery was immediately classified as secret, as it was so much incredible that even could shake the already existing social principles, reports Russia's newspaper Vecherny Volgograd.

Here is an extract from the official press-release:

“NASA scientists and engineers participating in exploration of Mars and Moon reported results of their discoveries at a briefing at the Washington national press club on March 21, 1996. It was announced for the first time that man-caused structures and objects had been discovered on the Moon.” The scientists spoke rather cautiously and evasively about the functioning objects, with the exception of UFO. They always mentioned the man-caused objects as possible, and pointed out the information was still under study, and official results would be published later.

It was mentioned at the briefing as well that the Soviet Union used to own some photo materials proving presence of reasonable activity on the Moon. And although it wasn't identified what kind of reasonable activity it was, thousands of photo-and video materials photographed from the Apollos and the Clementine space station demonstrated many parts on the lunar surface where the activity and its traces were perfectly evident. The video films and photos made by US astronauts during the Apollo program were demonstrated at the briefing. And people were extremely surprised why the materials hadn't been presented to the public earlier. And NASA specialists answered: “It was difficult to forecast the reaction of people to the information that some creatures had been or still were on the Moon. Besides, there were some other reasons to it, which were beyond NASA.

Specialist for lunar artifacts Richard Hoagland says that NASA is still trying to veil photo materials before they are published in public catalogues and files, they do retouching or partially refocus them while copying. Some investigators, Hoagland is among them, suppose that an extraterrestrial race had used the Moon as a terminal station during their activity on the Earth. The suggestions are confirmed by the legends and myths invented by different nations of our planet.

Ruins of lunar cities stretched along many kilometers, huge transparent domes on massive basements, numerous tunnels and other constructions make scientists reconsider their opinions concerning the lunar problems. How the Moon appeared and principles of its revolving around the Earth still pose a great problem for scientists.

Some partially destroyed objects on the lunar surface can’t be placed among natural geological formations, as they are of complex organization and geometrical structure. In the upper part of Rima Hadley, not far from the place where the Apollo-15 had landed, a construction surrounded with a tall D-shaped wall was discovered. As of now, different artifacts have been discovered in 44 regions. The NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, the Houston Planetary Institute and specialists from the bank of space information are investigating the regions. Mysterious terrace-shaped excavations of the rock have been discovered near the Tiho crater. The concentric hexahedral excavations and the tunnel entry at the terrace side cant be results of natural geological processes; instead, they look very much like open cast mines. A transparent dome raised above the crater edge was discovered near the crater Copernicus. The dome is unusual as it is glowing white and blue from inside. A rather unusual object, which is unusual indeed even for the Moon, was discovered in the upper part of the Factory area. A disk of about 50 meters in diameter stands on a square basement surrounded with rhombi walls. In the picture, close to the rhombi, we can also see a dark round embrasure in the ground, which resembles an entry in an underground caponier. There is a regular rectangular area between Factory and the crater Copernicus which is 300 meters wide 400 meters long.

Apollo-10 astronauts made a unique picture (AS10-32-4822) of a one-mile long object called Castle, which is hanging at the height of 14 kilometers and casts a distinct shadow on the lunar surface. The object seems to be consisting of several cylindrical units and a large conjunctive unit. Internal porous structure of the Castle is clearly seen in one of the pictures, which makes an impression that some parts of the object are transparent.

As it turned out at the briefing where many NASA scientists were present, when Richard Hoagland had requested originals of the Castle pictures for the second time, no pictures were found there at all. They disappeared even from the list of pictures made by the Apollo-10 crew. Only intermediate pictures of the object were found in the archives, which unfortunately donut depict the internal structure of the object.

When Apollo-12 crew landed on the lunar surface, they saw that the landing was observed by a half-transparent pyramidal object. It was hanging just several meters above the lunar surface and shimmered with all rainbow colors against the black sky.

In 1969, when the film about astronauts traveling to the Sea of Storms was demonstrated (the astronauts saw the strange objects once again, which were later called “striped glasses”), NASA finally understood what consequences such kind of control could bring. Astronaut Mitchell answered the question about his feelings after a successful return the following:

“My neck still aches as I had to constantly turn my head around because we felt we were not alone there. We had no choice but pray.”

Johnston, who worked at the Houston Space Center and studied photos and video materials done during the Apollo program, discussed the artifacts with Richard Hoagland and said, the NASA leadership was awfully annoyed with the great number of anomalous, to put it mildly, objects on the Moon. It was even said that piloted flights to the Moon could be banned in the programs network.

Investigators are especially interested in ancient structures resembling partially destroyed cities. The orbital shooting reveals an astonishingly regular geometry of square and rectangular constructions. They resemble our terrestrial cities seen from the height of 5-8 kilometers. A mission control specialist commented on the pictures:

“Our guys observed ruins of the Lunar cities, transparent pyramids, domes and God knows what else, which are currently hidden deep inside the NASA safes, and felt like Robinson Crusoe when he suddenly came across prints of human bare feet on the sand of the desert island.”

What do geologists and scientists say after studying the pictures of lunar cities and other anomalous objects? They say, such objects can’t be natural formations.

“We should admit they are artificial, especially the domes and pyramids. “

Reasonable activity of an alien civilization showed up unexpectedly close to us. We were not ready for it psychologically, and some people hardly believe they are true even now.