Who Built the Moon? (8 page)

There is also another major problem with this scenario revealed by the issue of the ongoing slowing down of Earth. Very precise astronomical measurements, some of them dating back to the observation of eclipses 2,500 years ago, indicate that the day is increasing in length by about one or two thousandths of a second per day per century. It has been thought that this tiny lengthening of the day was entirely due to the friction of the tides caused by the Sun and the Moon. But when attempts were made to predict changes in the apparent position of the Moon on the basis of this effect alone, it was found that the calculations did not agree with the observations at all. Another factor must be at work as well.

That factor was that iron is sinking to the core of the Earth, changing the moment of inertia and thereby the length of the day. When this was taken into consideration and calculations were made on the basis of both the tides and the changing moment of inertia due to sinking iron, the sums did agree with the observations. But in order to make the calculations agree, it was necessary to postulate a flow of 50,000 tonnes of iron from the mantle to the core of the earth every second!

Staggering though this volume of flow is, it would still take 500 million years to form the metallic core of the Earth and some calculations indicate that it may have taken as long as two billion years. If this reasoning is correct, which it appears to be, the Earth was made initially with large amounts of iron in its exterior parts. As the Moon was formed at a very early stage in the Earth’s existence (and possibly before), any material knocked off the surface by a major impact would contain large amounts of iron – which it does not.

The Big Whack theories are simply the best of all the impossible explanations for the existence of the Moon.

It is widely accepted that despite the intense investigation that has gone into understanding the Moon, and for all we know about its surface and the composition of its rocks, we are as much in the dark concerning its origins as we were before the first projectile left the Earth’s atmosphere.

As we have discussed, the oxygen isotope investigation proved that both Moon rocks and Earth rocks must have developed at exactly the same distance from the Sun, so the Moon definitely wasn’t a captured asteroid. The Moon has its fair share of the elements found on Earth but not in the same proportion. The Moon is substantially lacking in heavy metals when compared with the Earth, which accounts for its large size but small mass.

But it was the Apollo missions that identified something else that was weird about the Moon.

The first two Apollo crews had landed out on the smooth lunar mare, the lava seas that are relatively young by lunar standards, and now NASA wanted to visit a site where they could study the older parts of the Moon, which meant the rugged highlands. Although NASA was not ready to commit a lunar module (LM) to a landing in highly rocky terrain, the site selection committee was very interested in a place called the Fra Mauro Hills in the middle of the Ocean of Storms, which seemed like a fairly smooth section of the highlands.

Commander Jim Lovell along with Jack Swigert and Fred Haise were chosen for the Fra Mauro mission as the crew of Apollo 13. The launch, on April 11
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1970, went well, allaying the worst fears of those who were concerned about a mission with the unlucky number thirteen.

Then, fifty-five hours and fifty-five minutes into the mission (and on the thirteenth day of the month) all three astronauts heard and felt what they described as a ‘pretty large bang’ on board the spacecraft. The crew and the ground controllers made a rapid assessment of the health of the spacecraft and it was obvious that two of the three fuel cells in the service module were dead. No one knew exactly what had gone wrong but there was no doubt that the crew were in serious danger.

To survive they needed enough power, oxygen, and water for a four-day trip around the Moon and back to Earth, and it now looked as if these commodities were going to be in very short supply. Oxygen and hydrogen were normally combined in the fuel cells to produce electricity and water and both oxygen tanks were rapidly losing pressure so even the remaining fuel cell wouldn’t last long. In addition to short supplies of these basic commodities, without power in the command module, they would have to rely on the LM environmental control system to remove excess carbon dioxide from the cabin. And to add to their many woes, the main engine now had no power supply.

However, the flight crew and ground personnel all realized just how lucky they had been. As desperate as the situation was, the accident had come early in the mission and they still had their fully stocked lunar module as a resource. The LM had an engine that could be used to put the crew back on a homeward path, and it carried just enough water, oxygen, and power for the four days they need to fly around the Moon and head home.

As the stricken spacecraft swung behind the Moon, 164 miles above the surface, contact with the Earth was lost until it emerged on the other side and was again picked up by tracking stations. The following words were heard: ‘The view out there is fantastic... You can see where we’re zooming off.’

At 8:09 pm EST on April 14
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, Apollo 13 turned for home and the third stage of the Saturn V launch vehicle, weighing fifteen tonnes, was sent crashing into the Moon. As planned it struck the Moon with a force equivalent to 111⁄2 tonnes of TNT. The impact point was eighty-five miles west-northwest of the site where the Apollo 12 astronauts had set up a seismometer.

NASA reports demonstrate the reaction of scientists on Earth as the Saturn V hit the lunar surface – ‘The Moon rang like a bell.’

In November 1969 the Apollo 12 crew had sent their lunar module crashing into the Moon following their return to the command craft after their lunar landing mission. That lunar module had struck with a force of one tonne of TNT causing the shock waves to build up to a peak in eight minutes and then continue for nearly an hour. The seismic signals produced by the impact from Apollo 13 were twenty to thirty times greater and lasted four times longer than those resulting from the earlier LM crash. This time, peak intensity occurred after seven minutes and the reverberations lasted for three hours and twenty minutes, travelling to a depth of twenty-five miles, leading to the conclusion that the Moon has an unusually light core or possibly no core at all.

At the time Houston remarked to the Apollo 13 crew: ‘By the way, Aquarius, we see the results now from 12’s seismometer. Looks like your booster just hit the Moon, and it’s rocking a little bit.’

NASA reports how the information from these two artificial moonquakes led to a reconsideration of theories proposed about the lunar interior. Among the puzzling features, they say, are the rapid build-up to the peak and the prolonged reverberations, because nothing comparable happens when objects strike Earth.

When Chris was in Seattle a few years ago he had a meeting with Ken Johnston who had worked for Brown-Root and Northrop, which was a consortium between the Brown-Root Corporation and the Northrop Corporation at the Lunar Receiving Laboratory. The company was one of the prime contractors for NASA at the time of the Apollo missions and Ken was supervisor of the data and photo control department. Ken told Chris that at the time of the impact created by the Apollo 13 launch vehicle the scientists were not only saying that ‘the Moon rang like a bell’, they also described how the whole structure of the Moon ‘wobbled’ in a precise way, ‘almost as though it had gigantic hydraulic damper struts inside it.’

This ringing effect caused many people to pick up on speculation that had been going on for years that the Earth’s Moon could be hollow. Back in 1962 Dr Gordon McDonald, a leading scientist at NASA, published a report in the Astronautics Magazine where he stated that analysis of the Moon’s motion indicated that the Moon is hollow.

Dr Sean C Solomon, who was Professor of Geophysics at MIT and is the Director of the Terrestrial Magnetism Department, Carnegie Institution of Washington as well as the Principal Investigator for Carnegie’s research as part of the NASA Astrobiology Institute, has said: ‘The lunar orbiter experiments vastly improved our knowledge of the moon’s gravitational field...indicating the frightening possibility that the moon may be hollow.’

Why should this be frightening?

Carl Sagan, Professor of Astronomy and Space Sciences and director of the Laboratory for Planetary Studies at Cornell University hinted at the answer when he said, whilst discussing the moons of Mars, that ‘It is well understood that a natural satellite cannot be a hollow object.’
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The problem therefore is simple – if the Moon is hollow, someone or something manufactured it.

But the debate continues. A team from the University of Arizona in Tucson has detailed the results of their interpretation of data from the Lunar Prospector magnetometer where they estimate that the moon does have a tiny metal core that is roughly 420 miles (680km) across, plus or minus 112 miles (180km). Their team leader, was Lon Hood. ‘We knew that the Moon’s core was small, but we didn’t know it was this small,’ Hood said. ‘This really does add weight to the idea that the Moon’s origin is unique, unlike any other terrestrial body – Earth, Venus, Mars or Mercury.’
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So, it is possible that the Moon is hollow at its centre or has a very small core. There is also the possibility that it has voids in its make-up just as it has the super-dense zones we call mascons. But it seems that the structure is unusual whatever the case turns out to be.

The main argument against the idea of a hollow Moon that we found repeated time and again, was that there was no theory of the Moon’s origin that could explain such a circumstance. The argument goes: ‘Because we can’t explain how a natural satellite can form with a hollow centre – it cannot have one QED.’

This standpoint is fair enough – if you accept its founding premise, that the Moon is natural. And who would not make such an assumption?

But as we put aside all of our preconceptions about what can and cannot be, we have to accept that solid objects do not ring like a bell – but hollow ones do.

Hollow or not, we decided to look more closely at the mechanics of the Moon.

We had seen just how peculiar the Moon is, in so many ways. Our next step was to look into how our next-door neighbour in the cosmos actually affects life on Earth.

First of all we could not ignore the myth that the full Moon brings out madness and other evils in the form of more violence, more suicides, more accidents and more aggression – ideas that are possibly as old as history itself. The belief that the full Moon causes mental disorders and strange behaviour was particularly widespread throughout Europe in the Middle Ages.

But is there any scientific evidence to support these beliefs?

There have been many investigations into the subject and some have produced surprising results. Research carried out by a medical team at a hospital in Bradford, England, set out to test the hypothesis that the incidence of animal bites increases at the time of a full Moon. Using retrospective observational analysis at their accident and emergency department they investigated the pattern of patients who attended from 1997 to 1999 after being bitten by an animal.

The number of bites in each day was compared with the lunar phase in each month and they found that the incidence of animal bites rose significantly at the time of a full Moon. With the period of the full Moon as the reference point, the incidence rate ratio of the bites for all other periods of the lunar cycle was significantly lower. They concluded that the full Moon is associated with a significant increase in animal bites to humans.
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Of course, we must remember that correlation does not equate to causation. The pattern they found may be a strange statistical blip or, even if it is real, it could be entirely coincidental with the phases of the Moon. Without any suggestion of how the Moon could cause an increase in animal aggression towards humans, it is not possible to consider any connection as proven.

Another study looked into human aggression and the lunar synodic cycle occurring in Dade County, Florida. Data on five aggressive and/or violent human behaviours were examined to determine whether a relationship existed between the two. These included looking at the pattern of homicides, suicides, fatal traffic accidents, aggravated assaults and psychiatric emergency room visits.

The team concluded that homicides and aggravated assaults demonstrated a statistically significant clustering of cases around the full Moon. Psychiatric emergency room visits clustered around the first quarter and showed a significantly decreased frequency around new and full Moon. The suicide curve showed correlations with both aggravated assaults and fatal traffic accidents suggesting, they say, a self-destructive component for each of these behaviours. The existence of a biological rhythm of human aggression, which resonates with the lunar synodic cycle was postulated.
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Whilst these investigations were carried out carefully and scientifically it is important to remember that there are dozens of other studies that have failed to identify similar correlations. If there is some substance behind lunar myth it is yet to be proven. However, we feel that such a relationship is not beyond reason as the Moon exerts considerable gravitational effects on the Earth creating the tidal movements of the waters of our oceans, and humans are made up of nearly eighty per cent water. Whether or not lunar cycles affect our lives; solar ones certainly do.

At the time of writing these words the leaves on the trees here in Britain are beginning to be tinged with brown. The days are growing shorter and the nights are getting longer. As this happens, the average temperature each day begins to fall and much of our flora and fauna goes into a dormant state.

Of course, the same seasonal change is happening all across the northern hemisphere at latitudes between the Tropic of Cancer and the Arctic Circle. Meanwhile, countries in the southern hemisphere are entering spring and new growth is beginning to stir as the days lengthen and the average daily temperature increases. All of us who do not live on or near to the equator are familiar with the pattern of the changing seasons and the effect that these cycles have on the way we live our lives. To our ancestors in northern parts of Europe, Asia and America, the onset of winter must have been a time of fear and doubt, whilst the first buds of spring would have been a merciful relief with the signal that there would soon be fresh food to eat.