by Mike Bara
The Russians were the first to try. Their first three attempts, named Luna-1958A, 1958B and 1958C all failed in the ascent stage of the mission due to problems with the boosters. It wasn’t until Luna 1, actually the 4th Luna mission, that the Soviets finally got a Luna probe into orbit (the Russians had a habit of not officially recognizing their unsuccessful missions). Once there, the Russians took aim, fired their 3rd stage rocket, and propelled Luna 1 at its intended target – the Moon, some 239,000 miles away.
And they missed. By far more than the proverbial mile. By 3,725 of them to be exact.
Again, not to overemphasize points I have already made in The Choice and Dark Mission, but that is simply not possible if Newtonian mechanics is correct. To miss the Moon by more than one and a half times its own diameter when you’re already weightless and in Earth orbit is pretty much impossible, unless the laws of physics are somehow far different than we have been led to believe.
Meanwhile, the U.S. didn’t fare much better. In early 1959 a JPL constructed satellite, Pioneer 4, missed the Moon by a whopping 37,000 miles, more than 17 times the Moon’s diameter! Obviously, there were issues with navigating the space between Earth and our nearest neighbor, issues which were not successfully solved until many years later, when the Ranger 4 spacecraft lost all power shortly after achieving orbit, and subsequently did what no other American probe had yet been able to do – actually hit the Moon. Eventually, von Braun and NASA figured out that having active, spinning systems on board the spacecraft added energy to the system, and once they empirically accounted for this the era of modern lunar exploration really began (see The Choice).
The U.S. programs started with the Ranger series in the early 1960’s. These were designed to fly into the Moon at high velocity, transmitting back television images the entire way to give humans the first close-up views of the lunar surface. As I discussed in The Choice, there really wasn’t a fully successful Ranger mission until Ranger 7 in 1964, but the program allowed von Braun and NASA to figure out the hidden physics of interplanetary navigation. Ranger was soon followed by two new and parallel programs, Lunar Orbiter, which was to take reconnaissance photographs and map the entire surface of the Moon, and Surveyor, which was to test the ability to soft land on the lunar surface and study it.
The Lunar Orbiter series was highly successful, with all five missions being completed essentially as planned. Lunar Orbiter 1 was obviously the first in the series, launched in August 1966, and it was to photograph the equatorial section of the Moon’s near side so NASA could scout for possible manned landing sites. From an altitude that varied from 36 to 25 miles above the lunar surface, Lunar Orbiter 1 took some 42 high resolution and 187 medium resolution “frames” of the lunar surface (the camera was a line-by-line scanning system that transmitted images back to Earth as “framelets” that were lined up and reassembled as full images on Earth). The most famous image from Lunar Orbiter 1 was of the first view ever of the Earth from lunar orbit.
Once its mission was complete and its film exhausted, the spacecraft was deliberately crashed into the lunar surface in order to test NASA’s ability to remotely track the vehicle.
Like Lunar Orbiter l, Lunar Orbiter II (November, 1966) was designed as a landing site reconnaissance mission of the Moon’s equatorial region from high altitude (32 miles). It took a total of 609 high resolution and 208 medium resolution frames but because of the altitude, they were of questionable value. Lunar Orbiter II did become famous for an oblique view of the peak of the crater Copernicus which was hailed at the time as one of the great photos of the 20th century. But the most interesting photo Lunar Orbiter II took was by far image number LO2-61H3, which showed peaks that came to be known simply as “The Blair Cuspids.”
On November 22, 1966, – three years to the day from the date President Kennedy had been killed — NASA released a Lunar Orbiter II image from the Moon in the vicinity of the crater Cayley B in the Sea of Tranquility. In it, there were objects casting extremely long shadows that seemed to imply that the objects themselves were “towers” of seventy feet or more. Such objects, if they really were present on the lunar surface, would almost by definition be artificial. Eons of meteoric bombardment would have long since blasted any such naturally occurring objects into dust.
The “spires” were first reported on by Thomas O’Toole in the Washington Post the day after they were photographed. A subsequent article in Newsweek magazine added to the intrigue, and William Blair, a Boeing Company anthropologist, was the first to closely scrutinize them. Blair had extensive experience examining aerial survey maps to look for possible prehistoric archeological sites in the Southwest United States. In articles for the Los Angeles Times and then the Boeing News, Blair noted that the “spires” had a series of contextual, geometric relationships to each other. “If such a complex of structures were photographed on Earth, the archeologist’s first order of business would be to inspect and excavate test trenches and thus validate whether the prospective site has archeological significance,” he was quoted in the L.A. Times.
LO frame 67-H-218
Lunar Orbiter image LO2-61H3 (NASA)
The response from Dr. Richard V. Shorthill of the Boeing Scientific Research Laboratory was swift. “There are many of these rocks on the Moon’s surface. Pick some at random and you eventually will find a group that seems to conform to some kind of pattern.” He went on to claim that the long shadows were caused by the fact that ground was sloping away from relatively short objects, thereby elongating the shadows.
Blair’s rebuttal would later put Shorthill’s arguments in their appropriate context: “If this same axiom were applied to the origin of such surface features on Earth, more than half of the present known Aztec and Mayan architecture would still be under tree- and bush-studded depressions—the result of natural geophysical processes. The science of archeology would have never been developed, and most of the present knowledge of man’s physical evolution would still be a mystery.”
Subsequent analysis seemed to indicate Shorthill was wrong on all counts.
In 2001, Lan Fleming of a group calling itself the Lunascan Project, conducted an analysis of the “Blair Cuspids” as they were now known and concluded that the long shadows were caused by tall, spire-like objects. Later analysis indicated that the objects might not be so exceptional after all, and despite Blair’s “limited and highly speculative analysis of suspect coordinate relationships” that seemed to indicate the objects were distributed according to tetrahedral geometry, the general consensus today is that the “Blair Cuspids” are fairly normal boulders that were photographed under unusual lighting conditions. Current Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter images would seem to support that conclusion.
Lunar Orbiter III was the most prolific of the landing site missions, taking nearly 700 medium and high resolution images of the lunar surface from about 30 miles up. The final two missions, Lunar Orbiters IV and V, were high altitude missions designed for overall lunar mapping purposes. All of the Orbiters were subsequently crashed into the lunar surface intentionally to study tracking capabilities and measure the impacts themselves.
Having paved the way for landing site selection, the Lunar Orbiters could be set aside for the far more important Surveyor series. Surveyor, it turned out, was critically important because until one actually landed on the Moon’s surface, no one was quite sure what they would find there. In the 1950’s, Thomas Gold, an Austrian-born astrophysicist and professor of astronomy at Cornell University, speculated that the lunar regolith (the powdery dust that covers the entire lunar surface) might be as much as 10 feet deep in some places, making a safe landing on the surface well-nigh impossible. Gold later revised his assessments, and his revised prediction of the depth of the Moon dust (1-2 inches) turned out to be uncannily accurate. But his studies certainly concerned NASA enough that the Surveyor program was considered a high priority.
The “Blair Cuspids” today? (NASA/LRO)
The Surveyor missions
also served other purposes that were equally critical. While the Soviet’s had achieved the first soft landing on the Moon in 1966 with Luna 9, the U.S. had not done so and Surveyor was designed to test the landing radar systems and retro-rocket technology that would be used to land men on the Moon itself. Equipped with a high resolution television camera, Surveyor would be the first U.S. spacecraft to broadcast live images (as still photographs) from the Moon’s surface.
Surveyor I was launched on May 30th, 1966 on a direct landing trajectory (meaning it would not orbit the Moon, but would simply proceed on a collision course and then fire breaking rockets to land). It took close to 3 days to reach the vicinity of the Moon, and then fired its retro-rockets, slowing the spacecraft to a descent and soft landing in the Ocean of Storms (Oceanus Procellarum) on June 2nd of the same year.
Although Surveyor’s camera was black and white, color images of the lunar surface could be generated by taking three images with three different color filters (red, green and blue) applied over the lens. On Earth, the three images could then be overlaid to produce a single full-color image. When the images were created, they showed – to the scientists’ surprise, that the lunar surface is actually a very colorful, if not multi-colored place. Quickly deciding they must have done something wrong, the scientists “corrected” the color to produce flat, gray looking surface features. It was only decades later that this mystery made sense and the weird multi-colored environment of the lunar surface could be explained. But that’s a later chapter.
After the success of Surveyor I, Surveyor II quickly followed suit but became the first major setback for the program after one of its breaking rockets failed to fire during a mid-course correction. The spacecraft began tumbling and instead of soft landing in Sinus Medii (the “Sea in the Middle”) it impacted at high velocity (about 6,000 miles per hour) near the crater Copernicus and was completely obliterated.
Surveyor III was more successful, landing in Oceanus Procellarum on April 20th, 1967, but was not without its own problems. Two of the landing retro-rockets failed to shut down as planned and the spacecraft “hopped” twice on the surface of the Moon before settling into its final resting place. The Surveyor III spacecraft was later used as a landing target for the Apollo 12 mission in 1969 and the Lunar Module Intrepid successfully landed only 600 feet away. It was also the first mission to have a soil sampling scoop to analyze the lunar surface.
All of this only served to set up Surveyor IV, which should have been the crown jewel of the Surveyor program. After the failure of Surveyor II, Surveyor IV was scheduled to land in Sinus Medii and fulfill the lost mission of its sister ship. Sinus Medii was at the time considered the favorite for the first manned lunar landing, primarily because of its central location, relatively flat surface and interesting topography. All that was needed was for Surveyor IV to land and return some vital “ground truth” of the possible landing area. It didn’t happen.
While descending to the lunar surface on its terminal-descent phase, the spacecraft simply disappeared some 2 and ½ minutes before touchdown. Since the solid fueled descent retro-rocket was only some 2 seconds from cutting off, NASA publically concluded that the vehicle must have exploded at high altitude. However, if this was the case, a slow chemical explosion would have been recorded on the spacecraft’s telemetry sensors, allowing NASA to reconstruct the events as they happened. There was no such telemetry. It simply ceased to exist from one moment to the next.
While this must have disturbed everyone at NASA, eventually they were able to land Surveyor VI in Sinus Medii. But what that spacecraft subsequently found must have gone a long way towards explaining why we never attempted a manned Apollo landing there, and to explaining what really did happen to Surveyor IV…
Television image of shadow of Surveyor 1 footpad as it descends to the lunar surface. (NASA)
CHAPTER THREE
SINUS MEDII
Almost as soon as the U.S. probes began sending back images, there sprang up a small cottage industry of investigators looking at pictures and finding the unusual. Some of these efforts were well intended but amateurish; others were so bad that they seemed almost designed as disinformation. The first book calling attention to possible artifacts on the Moon was George Leonard’s Somebody Else is on The Moon. Published in 1976, Leonard’s book was a collection of his observations of various oddities that he saw (or thought he saw) in numerous Lunar Orbiter and Apollo photographs of the lunar surface. For the most part, his ideas were quaint but interesting, as he pointed to all manner of “cranes,” “towers” and “X-drones” that he claimed were actively mining the surface of the Moon. What is most interesting to me however was that Farouk El-Baz, an Egyptian geologist who was the head of NASA’s manned landing site selection team, actually met with Leonard to look at what he’d found. I’ve often thought that he did this to perhaps not only see what he and his team had missed in terms of Ancient Alien evidence, but also to see where they had slipped up in hiding that evidence.
Close-up of Ukert crater (inset) from North American catalog
Image from We found Alien Bases on the Moon purportedly showing cloud cover on the lunar surface. More likely, Steckling is seeing a glass dome structure acting like an atmosphere over the surface.
Another well-known comedy of errors is Fred Steckling’s We found Alien Bases on the Moon. In it, he points to various developer stains and photographic defects as “proof” that the Moon has an atmosphere, lakes, vegetation and cloud cover. Now, some of the images do show various “mists” and “fogs,” which as it turns out, are anything but. However, what they turned out to be is so much more interesting…
Still, it’s hard to be too critical of these early efforts by lunar anomaly hunters. The Moon presents quite a challenge for any investigator. The biggest problem with looking for evidence of ancient ruins on the Moon is not so much what to look for, but where to look. Or more exactly—where to start looking. The Moon is a big place, with a land area larger than the African continent, and there are literally tens of thousands of photos from the various NASA programs like Lunar Orbiter, Surveyor, Ranger and the manned Apollo missions. Deciding where to start looking would be a daunting task for anyone.
Luckily, in the early 1990s, researcher Richard C. Hoagland (my co-author on Dark Mission) got a big break that made it is easy for him to figure out where to look and what to look for. A friend had given him a 1960s era North American Aviation catalog made up of photos of the Moon taken by Earth based observatories. Having already spent a good number of years working on NASA images of Ancient Alien ruins on Mars, Hoagland had a pretty good idea what he was looking for and quickly spotted his first clue as to where to begin his investigation.
At first glance, each photo resembled the next—distance and close-up shots, craters and maria. But then he looked in the corner of page 241of the catalog, where a photo of the area around a crater named Trisnecker first appeared in the collection. There, right next to Trisnecker, was one really weird looking crater. This weird crater (named “Ukert,” after a German scholar) was not only triangular in shape, but its sides were made up of bright, highly reflective material while the darker center made up the geometric shape. It was almost as if someone had framed the triangle to help us spot it.
But, was it “a trick of light and shadow,” as NASA likes to say, or was it real?
This is all even more interesting when one considers that Ukert is found at almost the exact center of the lunar disk as viewed from Earth. At times, this 16 mile-wide crater is directly opposite, or under (if you’re standing on the lunar surface) the “sub-Earth point,” the location on the Moon where the Earth would be seen directly overhead. So, a near perfect triangle located right in the middle of the Moon? It was almost as if someone wanted us to find the area and look around.
Two views of the triangular shaped crater Ukert from Earth based Lick Observatory (left) and NASA’s Clementine probe (right).
NASA footprint map of Sinus Medii r
econnaissance photography.
Ukert is located in a region known as Sinus Medii, Latin for “The Sea (in the) Middle,” and as I mentioned in chapter 2, early in the Apollo program it was considered the first choice for a manned lunar landing site when the Apollo missions began. But as we will see later in the book, NASA’s photographic exploration of the area must have quickly scared them off that idea…
By the time the practice landing mission Apollo 10 was launched in May 1969, Sinus Medii had been rejected as the site for the first full-scale manned lunar landing, scheduled for Apollo 11 in July, 1969. But this didn’t stop the Apollo 10 astronauts (Tom Stafford, Gene Cernan and John Young) from taking hundreds of pictures of the Sinus Medii region with hand held Hasselblad cameras.
It’s obvious from the footprint maps that someone at NASA wanted to photograph the hell out of the entire Sinus Medii/Ukert region, in spite of the fact NASA no longer had any intention of landing there. The question is why? Many of the photographs, like frame AS10-32-4819, seemed to focus less on the flatlands where a landing might be made, and more on the weird geometric areas and mountains where such a landing would be pretty much impossible. Was NASA looking for something else besides a future Apollo landing site?
Encouraged, Hoagland began by ordering pictures from some of NASA’s early 1960’s robotic probes sent to the Moon, especially the Lunar Orbiter series of spacecraft. He quickly found evidence of something far stranger than simply rocks or mountains.
