Astronaut Theology: Things That Should Not Be Known

The "Moon as Alien Base" meme might not be the most popular meme out there, but it's one of the most persistent. 

Astronomers were seeing anomalous goings-on on the Moon over a century ago, and some UFO researchers claim that hostile alien action is the reason that NAZCA NASA never went back to the Moon, or in some cases the reason that footage and photography of the Apollo missions was faked (in some cases by Stanley Kubrick). 

But there's another reason that NASA would not want the public to know what the Apollo missions were really up to.

Richard Hoagland has written and spoken extensively on his beliefs that NASA is covering up the Moon missions to hide alien artifacts found by the Apollo crews. While his theories are well known through his appearances on Coast 2 Coast and other programs, less known-- and even more interesting -- is the fact that two unmanned moon missions indeed discovered enormous obelisks on the Moon's surface, arranged in a geometric design.

Four years ago, Russia's Luna-9 and America's Orbiter-2 both photographed groups of solid structures at two widely separated locations on the lunar surface. These two groups of objects are arranged in definite geometric patterns and appear to have been placed there by intelligent beings. 

Since American space officials have chosen not to publicize these findings, our readers are probably not aware of their existence. The Luna-9 photographs, taken on February 4, 1966, after the craft had landed in the Ocean of Storms, reveal two straight lines of equidistant stones that look like the markers along an airport runway. These circular stones are all identical, and are positioned at an angle that produces a strong reflection from the sun, which would render them visible to descending aircraft. 

--"Mysterious "Monuments" on the Moon," Argosy Magazine, August, 1970 
Volume 371, Number 2

Which goes to show you that you don't have to do much to bury a story that you don't want to get out there-- you simply don't talk about it. I'd never have heard about had I not read about it in the oracular grimoire men call "UFO Flying Saucers" in hushed, forboding tones.

 

In addition to the endless mysteries unveiled in UFO Flying Saucers, there's also the startling prophecies of one Jacob Kurtzberg, better known as Jack Kirby, the King of Comics. Longtime readers know that Kirby knew way too many things he shouldn't and foresaw things that no one else could see. 

We've already looked at the very aptly -named "The Great Moon Mystery" in the context of its startling similarities to Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, which are especially stunning given the story was drawn in 1959 and sat in a drawer at the Harvey Comics warehouse until seeing print well after 2001 was in production. Here's a refresher:

The story "The Great Moon Mystery" has a TV production crew stumble on an alien artifact (an obelisk, in this case) on the moon, which immediately captures them in a force field. A team of astronauts try to rescue them and shoot at the obelisk, but are transformed into beings of light and send on a journey across the vast reaches of the Universe (see page at top). The journey ends in Wizard of Oz-like fashion when the astronauts visualize themselves back on the Moon.

What I didn't realize at the time was that Kirby was also remote-viewing the Moon obelisk back in 1959, perhaps even unconsciously foreseeing that the obelisk would be photographed a couple months before the story was published. It wouldn't be until a few years after that the obelisk discovery was leaked, and it never made the mainstream press as far as I can tell.

  Even more remarkable was the fact that the same day I posted yet another Kirby/Kubrick/Moon story the news of a monolith on Mars' moon Phobos broke, along with some typical Masonic doubletalk from Bu33 Aldrin. OK, so what? This is all just more of that weird nexus of junk culture, Fortean hijinks and occult toomfoolery, right? 

Of course there's nothing on the Moon-- aren't several space agencies planning Moon missions as I write? Well, yeah.

But with one giant mother of a caveat. From the Old Grey Lady:

NASA would like to keep the competitors away from the Apollo landing sites, and it wants to create a no-fly-and-no-drive zone above and around them, especially where the first and last manned Moon missions — Apollo 11 and Apollo 17 — landed. The risk is that dust kicked up by a successful landing, or a crash, could disturb the traces of our presence on the Moon.

There is no mention yet how the rules would be enforced. But they do give rise to some interesting thoughts. In the realms of science fiction, the universe abounds in the relics of civilizations scattered among the stars. These landing sites are the first, fragile relics left by actual humans on a nonterrestrial body.- New York Times, "That Old Heritage Moon"

I don't know about you, but I don't believe this nonsense about "disturbing historical sites" for a millisecond. If NASA was so worried about them they wouldn't have left all that equipment up there unprotected, if in fact they actually did land there (I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt).

I don't what it is exactly, but my gut tells me NASA is hiding something. And both the Apollo hoax crowd and the alien artifact crowd should be all over the no-fly zone story. It's so unbelievable that there has to be much more to the story than what we're being told.

Syncs and prophecies are one thing, but when it all crosses over into real world drama is when I sit up and pay attention.

For instance, here's another story from UFO Flying Saucers, a sensationalistic rewriting of the 1975 UFO disappearances in Oregon. The story made the national news at the time, since over 30 people fell from sight for over two months, leaving their friends and families in a state of near panic. It was later revealed that the missing persons were enlisted into a millennial UFO cult.

The leaders are called "Her" and "Him" in the story but were none other than Bo and Peep, aka Ti and Do, aka Marshall Applewhite and Bonnie Nettles, founders of the Heaven's Gate suicide cult. As you can see the artist was fairly successful in capturing Applewhite's likeness, not so much with Nettles.

Heaven's Gate was a classic millennial cult in the Essene/Gnostic model and their desire to escape their meat-prisons led them to extreme acts like castration in order to overcome the desires of the flesh. Compared to many other gurus, Applewhite was nearly benevolent, which is not to say the Gate wasn't as totalizing and authoritarian as other, similar cults.

Suicide seems to be the inevitable result of the kind of total denial of the physical world that the Gate immersed themselves in, and Applewhite cited the mass suicides at Masada during the Judean Wars as precedent.

However, the Gate didn't believe they were killing themselves at all. They believed they were dis-incarnating, so that a passing mothership traveling in the wake of the Hale-Bopp comet would be able to "beam them up" (this cult watched a shit-ton of Star Trek) and take them to the level above human.

Here's where remote viewing enters into the picture again; the Hale-Bopp UFO was "viewed" by Major Ed Dames (who was the basis for Kevin Spacey's character in The Men Who Stare at Goats) who claimed that it was coming to spread mass death on Earth, which was the basis of Applewhite's vague warnings of a planetary cleansing that his followers were to escape.

OK, this is all nuts. Dames is a laughing stock even within the paranormal community, Applewhite was a nut who couldn't deal with his sexuality and found a bunch of lost souls to play the avuncular minister/father-figure to. Hale-Bopp came and went without any noticable apocalypse.

Except one tiny, little detail keeps nagging at me...

At the same time the Heaven's Gate cult was preparing to exit their vehicles (so to speak), one of the most notorious UFO flaps of our time was unfolding just a few hundred miles to the east in Phoenix. 

As thousands of citizens watched, enormous triangular craft scoured the skies for several nights, allegedly. The usual, attention-starved, zany hoaxter types have come forward to claim responsibility, but none of their claims have stood up to any kind of scrutiny. The event remains a mystery.

So just as alien moon base and Apollo hoax theorists can point to the bizarre "no fly zone" rule NASA has proclaimed as proof things are not what they seem, Hale-Bopp UFO theories can't totally be dismissed in light of the Phoenix Lights. As with all of the paranormal, no side can truly claim victory, though they usually do.

Like so many other things, the truth remains elusive. As its designed to be, I'd argue...