Monday, July 20, 2009

Space/Gods: Mars, Moonshots and Masonry

Check out the Telegraph's gallery of Apollo UFO imagery

OK, I've got a lot of ground to cover here - I'm going to try to cover some of the weirdness aspects of Apollo 11, as well as all of the varying theories and controversies over it. But I did want to hit this story. 


Some have claimed that the reason we've not returned to the Moon is that there are alien bases there, and we've been warned off. Sounds crazy, some might say. But those who subscribe to that theory might find Buzz Aldrin's attitude about going back there quite interesting:
In an op-ed in The Washington Post on Thursday, Aldrin wrote that "a race to the moon is a dead end," and that "the moon is a lifeless, barren world, its stark desolation matched by its hostility to all living things.” Instead, Aldrin argues not only for a manned mission to Mars, but for a long-term program to build a human colony on the planet in order to research whether it once supported—or currently supports—life.
"Its hostility to all living things." Fascinating. Aldrin had put forth his proposals at a Mars summit in Plymouth, England, a fact which definitely caught my attention. For some reason, Plymouth and Mars seem to be very intimately linked. 

I uncovered this strange connection back in December:
Nasa's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has finally spotted rocks on the Red Planet that bear carbonate minerals....
It turns out that this crucial mineral was discovered at the Nili Fossae, named for - you guessed it - The Nile River:
The results were presented Thursday at an American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco and will appear Friday in the journal Science.
Scientists planning the next Mars landing — the Mars Science Laboratory — initially considered Nili Fossae as a potential landing site, but it did not make the final cut.- AP
So this was announced on Thursday the 18th, which is the 388th anniversary of the landing of the Mayflower at Plymouth... And how were the sacrifices of those brave and dedicated Christian pilgrims commemorated? 
That obelisk is in Plymouth, England but it has a cousin in Massachusetts. The cornerstone of that obelisk was laid in an elaborate ceremony, involving a Naval regatta and the President of the United States. Oh, I forgot to mention- it was an elaborate Masonic ceremony:

“In the name of the Most Worshipful Grand Lodge in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts I now proclaim that the corner stone of the structure to be here erected has this day been found square, level, and plumb, true and trusty, and laid according to the old customs by the Grand Master of Masons..."

The carefully planned ceremony had begun early in the morning of August 20, 1907 when the presidential yacht Mayflower, with President Theodore Roosevelt aboard, sailed into Provincetown Harbor around 10 o’clock. As it rounded Long Point and entered the harbor, it passed down a passage created by eight battleships composed of two squadrons.

And guess what else happened on August 2o? Well, in 1975 the Viking Mars Probe was launched.
How many of you think that the selection of Plymouth for this Mars Summit was coincidental? Yeah, me neither. Bonus factoid: Aleister Crowley was brought up in the Plymouth Brethren, who also brought us the Rapture craze and Dispensationalism. Speaking of which, apparently for some "For some, the first Moon landing in 1969 was “almost a religious experience”
Forty years later, Debbie Rogers of Hingham vividly recalls the thrill of watching the Apollo 11 moon landing on July 20, 1969 – and not just because one of the astronauts, Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin, was a friend.
“It was almost a religious experience,” Rogers said this week.
Of course, the media was hitting those nefarious "conspiracy theorists" pretty hard this past week, "debunking" all of their dangerous theories about the Moon landings being faked. Yet all of the various news agencies spent so much time frothing at their collective mouths about it that it set my hidden agenda detector a-pinging.


CNN covered the story in a fairly impartial manner, and ABC correctly headlined its rebuttal story "Refuting the Most Popular Apollo Moon Landing Hoax Theories" rather than the presumptuous "debunking," but several other outlets offered debunkings, such as the so-called Mythbusters, who already have decided that that the theories can be "busted" even before they even gather any new evidence. 

Now, there's a whole cottage industry of so-called skeptics whose behavior is remarkably similar to petulant adolescents and whose attitude towards contrary evidence is indistinguishable from the Iranian Ayatollahs. Whatever kind of "punk" attitude these people present to the public, the fact is that they are all essentially shills for the Establishment. That being said, I was still extremely puzzled by all the attention paid the Moon hoax crowd, which even in the relatively marginal conspiracy theory world, is a pretty small constituency. 

 And just to add to the cognitive dissonance, we also hear stories that an iconic photograph from the Spanish Civil War was itself a hoax and that NASA erased the original Apollo tapes and used a Hollywood production house to restore copies. You don't need to be a conspiracy theorist to sense some weird psyop agenda at work here. 

  Now, let me go on record as believing the Apollo landings were real (they were too ritually important not to be), though perhaps not quite what we saw on TV. However, there's another possibility here that the media is not shoving down your throat- the landings were real but some of the photos and film from them were faked.

Why? Possibly because the real nature of and equipment used in the Apollo missions are highly sensitive and not meant for public consumption. There are theories out there that there are ancient artifacts on the Moon, exactly the kind that the Brookings Institute recommended be kept secret in 1958 in their report on UFOs to NASA. As as I said before, some researchers like Chris Everard believe that there are still active alien bases on the Moon. 

By pushing the Apollo hoax theme to death and then letting all of the skeptic mediawhores throw their tantrums at the theorists, the media is effectively shutting down any other speculation on the Apollo missions and why they suddenly stopped. Two prominent astronauts- Edgar Mitchell and the late Gordon Cooper- are both on record as believing that UFOs are real. 

And Aldrin's cryptic comment about hostility to all life might be interpreted by some as a coded warning or at least a Freudian slip. And after a lot of noise made about the Constellation missions when Barackobamun took office, there are reports coming in that the future of the program is in doubt. And now the Centaur rocket will be bombing the Moon in October, allegedly to gauge the presence of water crystals.

  I wonder if that has anything to do with the strange explosions and flaming debris we've seen falling from the sky over the past few months or the fact that June began and ended with two jetliners mysteriously dropping into the sea. It surely doesn't have anything to do with this summer's blockbuster hit which features humankind drafted into a war between alien factions. Which, come to think of it, is the basic storyline in the new Star Trek film as well. 

  UPDATE: Wow, those Apollo 11 chaps are riding the Mars-not-Moon meme hard today:

Two of the astronauts who took part in the first Moon landing 40 years ago have called for renewed efforts to send a manned mission to Mars. At a rare public reunion of the Apollo 11 crew, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins said Mars instead of the Moon should be the focus of exploration.
Those who believe that mankind has been warned away from the Moon won't be exactly dissuaded by Michael Collins' remarks today:

Mr Collins, who circled the Moon alone while Mr Armstrong and Mr Aldrin walked on it, said Mars was more interesting than the Moon.

"Sometimes I think I flew to the wrong place. Mars was always my favourite as a kid and it still is today."

He urged further exploration, saying: "I worry that the current emphasis on returning to the Moon will cause us to become ensnared in a technological briar patch needlessly delaying for decades the exploration of Mars - a much more worthwhile destination."

And also a hell of a lot farther away. What do these guys know about Mars that we don't? Those who believe that the Apollo missions were faked to boost national morale won't be discouraged by Neil Armstrong's remarks either:

Neil Armstrong, the first man on the Moon, said the race to get to the Moon had been the ultimate peaceful contest. He said it was an "exceptional national investment" for the US and ex-USSR. Mr Armstrong told the audience: "It was the ultimate peaceful competition: USA vs USSR. "I'll not assert that it was a diversion which prevented a war, nevertheless it was a diversion."
And those who believe that the Cold War was itself a hoax meant to mask an ongoing globalist agenda won't be discouraged by these cryptic remarks by Armstrong:
"Eventually, it provided a mechanism for engendering co-operation between former adversaries. In that sense, among others, it was an exceptional national investment for both sides."

Both sides? I missed something- what cooperation was there in the Apollo program? Apollo 17 skipper Gene Cernan offered a dissenting voice, of a sort:
"We need to go back to the Moon, we need to learn a little bit more about what we think we know already, we need to establish bases, put new telescopes there, get prepared to go to Mars. The ultimate goal, truly, is to go to Mars," he told journalists. 
UPDATE: Remember those noctilucent clouds linked to both the Tunguska event and the space shuttle explosion? Well, it turns out they are becoming mysteriously more common:
“That’s a real concern and question,” said James Russell, an atmospheric scientist at Hampton University and the principal investigator of an ongoing NASA satellite mission to study the clouds. “Why are they getting more numerous? Why are they getting brighter? Why are they appearing at lower latitudes?” Nobody knows for sure, but most of the answers seem to point to human-caused global atmospheric change.
Of course they do. The media decided that before they even heard of the phenomenon. Never mind the fact that they were observed after shuttle launches or that 2009 is already a banner year for UFO sightings. 

 I'm sure there's no connection.