Ancient Aliens on the Moon (12 page)

That was bad enough. But what NASA attempted to force Johnston to do later was even worse. As we recounted it in
Dark Mission:

…in 1972, near the end of the manned lunar program, Johnston was called into the office of Bud Laskawa, Johnston’s lead at the LRL records division. At the meeting, Laskawa told Johnston that orders had come down from NASA Headquarters (through Dr. Michael Duke, Laskawa and Johnston’s NASA boss) to destroy
all
of the copies of the original lunar photography that he had been protecting and archiving for the past several years.

Johnston was dumbfounded that anyone could order the destruction of the official photographic record of Mankind’s first venture beyond the earth. He protested, and begged to be allowed to donate the photographs to various universities or foundations, but was told there was “no chance.” The orders were explicit—he was to destroy all four sets of the literally tens of thousands of Apollo lunar photos taken by the astronauts.

Johnston found this situation unconscionable. Eventually, after further protests, he relented and destroyed three full sets of the data—but with his guilt eating away at him, he decided to save one complete set “elsewhere.” Some of the images and negatives he kept for himself. However, since the collection was so vast, he eventually decided to donate the rest to his alma mater, Oklahoma City University, where the data quietly resided—out of NASA’s oversight—for over thirty years…

Unfortunately, when Johnston and Hoagland went to Oklahoma City University and attempted to retrieve the photos, they found that a retired professor had apparently absconded with most of them, leaving only about a thousand first generation prints in Ken’s personal collection to examine.

A close examination of Ken’s surviving photos revealed overwhelming evidence that the lunar scaffolding model was correct. And it also raised the question of just why NASA would want these nearly priceless photos destroyed.

Because Ken’s photos are prints, rather than negatives, theoretically they are of lesser value than what is currently in the NASA archives. But in reality, this is not the case. The original negatives are kept in a sealed vault in NASA’s Houston facility, and have only rarely been seen by outsiders. The negatives currently at sites like the National Space Science Data Center in Maryland and in other official NASA archives are in fact multi-generational copies of (theoretically) those originals. In other words, a copy of copy of a copy, at the very least. Ken’s prints however, were first generation, made from those rare original negatives. By that alone, they must have contained more information than the best of NASA’s archive negatives do today. And what they showed was astounding.

NASA photo AS14-66-9301.

In going over Ken’s collection, a couple of images immediately stood out. The first was Apollo 14 photograph AS14-66-9301, now known as the (in) famous “Mitchell Under Glass” frame.

At first, AS14-66-9301 seems to be a very innocuous photo of the lunar surface. Taken as part of a landing site panorama by astronaut Alan Sheppard, it shows Lunar Module pilot Edgar Mitchell setting up a scientific experiment in the foreground and a substantial amount of lunar “sky” in the background. The interest began when Ken’s wife Fran noticed something odd in that background. “Why is the sky
blue?”
she asked.

Looking closer, it was easy to see an odd blue spec on the image in the sky above the landing site. Because of the very short exposure times of the surface photography (on the order of 1/250
^th
of a second) there was no way it could be something in space or far beyond the landing site. It is a common misconception that you should be able to see stars and other faint, far-off objects in photos from the lunar surface. In reality, the sky should be absolute, seamless black. Unless it was a photographic defect, the blue spec had to be something very close to the landing site itself.

Ultra close-up of specular reflection and geometric structures from AS14-66-9301.

Under enhancement, the blue spec turned out to be a blue-scattered specular reflection off of the same type of towering, lattice-work structure that was seen at Sinus Medii. Since the Apollo 14 landing site was well away from Sinus Medii in the Ocean of Storms (Oceanus Procellarum) it could not be the same structure. It could only be a completely different set of similar but separate transparent, glass-like Ancient Alien ruins.

Further examination of the image and the rest of the panorama revealed that the Apollo 14 Lunar Module Antares had landed literally right in the middle of a vast complex of these towering glass structures in the Ocean of Storms. Not only that, but these structures behaved exactly as they should under light scattering from the sun, brighter near the light source and 180 degrees from it, and darker the farther away from the light source. In other words, if the structures seen in the images were photographic defects, then they were photographic defects that scattered light exactly as if they were real, glass-like transparent structures on the surface of the Moon. But the real “smoking gun” came when the photos were compared to another Apollo mission; Apollo 12.

Apollo 12 had landed on the in the Ocean of Storms some 22 months earlier, at a site only 122 miles away. In theory, a comparison of images from the two landing sites might shed some light on whether these enormous structures were really there on the surface of the Moon. If the same towering, megalithic edifices could be seen images from both missions, then that would be a final confirmation that these were real structures and not any kind of photo defect.

AS14-66-9301 showing angled support structure from Apollo 14 landing site.

The focus was immediately on the brilliant blue specular reflection seen in the Mitchell Under Glass photo. The source of the reflection seemed to be embedded in a lattice work of filaments and supports at 90 degree angles to the local lunar surface. But behind the reflection was a series of slanted, inclined support structures visibly connecting with lunar surface at an angle. If these massive and distinctive features could be spotted in some imagery from Apollo 12 as well, it would be the proverbial smoking gun.

AS 14-66-9301

An initial search of the Apollo 12 hand held photography was disappointing. The sky in many of the images showed signs of being white-washed (or “black-washed,” in this case) and while a few spectacular photos were found, none of them were pointed in the direction of the Apollo 14 landing site, where (theoretically) these massive inclined buttresses might be spotted. In addition, there was no video to work from, since astronaut Alan Bean had inexplicably pointed the Intrepid’s TV camera right at the sun almost immediately after the astronauts began their first Extra Vehicular Activity, burning it out. Given that he was specifically trained not to make such a mistake, I tend to wonder if maybe someone at NASA was worried about what might actually be visible in the TV images. Apollo 11 hadn’t had that problem, since it was mostly a symbolic mission that landed in the middle of nowhere.

It wasn’t until Hoagland began examining some early NASA promotional films that he struck gold. At the height of the Apollo Program, when new lunar landing missions were coming every few months, NASA’s Public Affairs Offices were busy churning out promotional films and press release photos. Their job was to try to communicate the on-going success of Apollo to the American people and the Congress through the press. Their primary tools in that era (remember, this was long before the Internet) were mainly newspapers and four-color, glossy magazines—like
Life
and
National Geographic
, as well as television. For the magazines, they provided high-quality still photographs, and for television and school classrooms they provided a series of short films focusing on each new mission as it successfully ended.

Apollo 12 image showing astronaut Alan Bean in front of glass like lunar structures beyond the horizon.

It was possible that this extraordinary time-pressure on NASA Public Affairs to get the word out might really have allowed the “real stuff” — photographic details of what the crews really saw and photographed upon the Moon to slip through the cracks. Just after Apollo 12, NASA had released just such 16mm film, called
Pinpoint for Science.