GPS. There were no mountains to navigate by,” Wade says. “The pilots had no reference points. Just a lot of snow and ice out there. Temperatures of nearly fifty degrees below zero.” Helping out from high above was an Air Force U-2 spy plane.
After several long months, 90 percent of the debris from Cosmos 954 had been recovered. In the postaccident analysis, officials at NORAD determined that if the satellite had made one last orbit before crashing, its trajectory would have put it down somewhere on America’s East Coast.
Chapter Nineteen: The Lunar-Landing Conspiracy and Other Legends of Area 51
Two hundred and fifty thousand miles from the Nevada Test Site, on July 20, 1969, with less than ninety-four seconds of fuel remaining, Neil Armstrong and copilot Buzz Aldrin were facing almost certain death as they approached the Sea of Tranquillity on the moon. The autotargeting on their lunar landing module, famously called the Eagle, was taking them down onto a football-field-size crater laden with jagged boulders. To have crash-landed there would have meant death. The autotargeting was burning precious fuel with each passing second; the quick- thinking Neil Armstrong turned it off, took manual control of the Eagle, and, as he would tell NASA officials at Mission Control in Houston, Texas, only moments later, began “flying manually over the rock field to find a reasonably good area” to land. When Armstrong finally set the Eagle down safely on the moon, there was a mere twenty seconds’ worth of fuel left in the descent tanks.
Practice makes perfect, and no doubt Armstrong’s hundreds of hours flying experimental aircraft like the X-15 rocket ship — in dangerous and often death-defying scenarios — helped prepare him for piloting a safe landing on the moon. As with most seminal U.S. government accomplishments, particularly those involving science, it took thousands of men working hundreds of thousands of hours inside scores of research centers and test facilities — not to mention a number of chemical rockets designed by Wernher Von Braun — to get the Apollo 11 astronauts and five additional crews (Apollos 12, 14, 15, 16, and 17) to the moon and back home. A little-known fact is that to prepare for what it would actually be like to walk around on the geology of the moon, the astronauts visited the Nevada Test Site. There, they hiked inside several atomic craters, learning what kind of geology they might have to deal with on the lunar surface’s inhospitable terrain. The Atomic Energy Commission’s Ernie Williams was their guide.
“I spent three days with the astronauts in Areas 7, 9, and 10 during astronaut training, several years before they went to the moon,” Williams recalls. In the 1960s, astronauts had rock-star status, and Williams remembered the event like it was yesterday. “The astronauts had coveralls and wore field packs, mock-ups of the real thing, strapped on their backs. They had cameras mounted on their hats and they took turns walking up and down the subsidence craters. It was steep, rocky terrain,” he explains. Williams originally worked for the Atomic Energy Commission in feeding and housing, making sure the “feed wagon” got to remote areas of the atomic bombing range. “We’d get mashed potatoes and gravy to the faraway places inside the test site,” Williams says, “hot food being a key to morale.” But the multitalented Williams quickly became the test site’s jack-of-all-trades, including astronaut guide. His other jobs included being in charge of the motor pool and helping CIA engineers drill for Area 51’s first water well. But for Williams, the highlight of his career was escorting the first men on the moon inside the atomic craters.
“I was with them in 1965, and again five years later when they came back,” Williams recalls. This time the astronauts arrived with a lunar roving vehicle to test what it might be like driving on the moon. The astronauts were taken out to the Schooner crater, located on the Pahute Mesa in Area 20. “We picked them up at the Pahute airstrip and took them and the vehicle into the crater where there was pretty rough terrain,” Williams explains. “Some boulders out there were ten feet tall. One of the astronauts said, ‘If we encounter this kind of thing on the moon, we’re not going to get very far.’” Williams recalls the astronauts learning how to fix a flat tire on the moon. “They took off a steel tire and put on a rubber one” out in the field.
The lunar roving vehicle was not a fast-moving vehicle, and the astronauts took turns driving it. “NASA had built it and had driven it in a lot of flat places,” Williams explains. “But before it came to the test site and drove on the craters, the vehicle had no real experience on inhospitable terrain. The astronauts also did a lot of walking out there,” Williams adds. One of the requirements of the Apollo astronauts who would be driving during moon missions was that they had to be able to walk back to the lunar module if the rover failed.
The craters Williams was talking about are subsidence craters— geologic by-products of underground bomb tests. When a nuclear bomb is placed in a deep vertical shaft, as hundreds were at the test site (not to be confused with tunnel tests), the explosion vaporizes the surrounding earth and liquefies the rock. Once that molten rock cools, it solidifies at the bottom of the cavity, and the earth above it collapses, creating the crater. The glass-coated rock, giant boulders, and loose rubble that remain resemble the craters found on the moon. So similar in geology were the atomic craters to moon craters that in voice transcripts sent back during the Apollo 16 and Apollo 17 missions, astronauts twice referred to the craters at the Nevada Test Site. During Apollo 16, John W. Young got specific. A quarter of a million miles away from Earth, while marveling at a lunar crater laden with rocks, Young asked fellow astronaut Charles M. Duke Jr., “Remember how it was up at that crater? At Schooner.” He was referring to the atomic crater Ernie Williams took the astronauts to in Area 20. During Apollo 17, while looking at the Haemus Mountains, Harrison H. Schmitt can be heard talking about the Buckboard Mesa craters in Area 19. For Ernie Williams, hearing this comparison was a beautiful moment. For lunar-landing conspiracy theorists, of which there are millions worldwide, the feeling was one of suspicion. For these naysayers, Schmitt’s telemetry tapes, the moon photographs, the moon rocks— everything having to do with the Apollo moon missions would become grist for a number of ever-growing conspiracies that have been tied to man’s journey to the moon.
Just two months after Armstrong and Aldrin returned home, a UFOon-the-moon conspiracy was born. On September 29, 1969, in New York City, the newest installment of National Bulletin magazine rolled off the printing press with a shocking headline: “Phony Transmission Failure Hides Apollo 11 Discovery. Moon Is a UFO Base,” it read. The author of the article, Sam Pepper, said he’d been leaked a transcript of what NASA had allegedly edited out of the live broadcast back from the moon, namely, that there were UFOs there. Various UFO groups pressed their congressmen to take action, several of whom wrote to NASA requesting a response. “The incident… did not take place,” NASA’s assistant administrator for legal affairs shot back in a memo from January 1970.
As time passed the ufologists continued to write stories about the moon being a base for aliens and UFOs. For the most part, NASA ignored them. But then, in the midseventies, a newly famous film director named Steven Spielberg decided to make a film about aliens coming down to visit Earth. He sent NASA officials his script for Close Encounters of the Third Kind, expecting their endorsement. Instead, NASA sent Spielberg an angry twenty-page letter opposing his film. “I had wanted co-operation from them,” Spielberg said in a 1978 interview, “but when they read the script they got very angry and felt that it was a film that would be dangerous. I think they mainly wrote the letter because Jaws convinced so many people around the world that there were sharks in toilets and bathtubs, not just in the oceans and rivers. They were afraid the same kind of epidemic would happen with UFOs.” Fringe ufologists were one thing as far as NASA was concerned. Steven Spielberg had millions of movie fans. He was a modern-day version of Orson Welles.
Right around the same time, another moon conspiracy theorist let his idea loose on the American public, a theory that did not involve UFOs. In 1974, a man named William Kaysing self-published a book called We Never Went to the Moon: America’s Thirty-Billion-Dollar Swindle. With these three questions, Kaysing became known as the father of the lunar-landing conspiracy:
How can the American flag flutter when there is no wind on the moon?
Why can’t the stars be seen in the moon photographs? Why is there no blast crater where Apollo’s landing vehicle landed?
Kaysing, who died in 2005, often said his skepticism began when he was an analyst and engineer at Rocketdyne, the company that designed the Saturn rockets that allowed man to get to the moon. While watching the lunar landing live on television, he said he experienced “an intuitive feeling that what was being shown was not real.” Later, he began scrutinizing the moon-landing photographs for evidence of a hoax. Kaysing’s original three questions have since planted seeds in millions upon millions of people who continue to insist that NASA did not put men on the moon. The lunar-landing conspiracy ebbs and flows in popularity, but as of 2011, it shows no signs of going away.
