Ancient Aliens on the Moon (6 page)

Surveyor I was launched on May 30
^th
, 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 2
^nd
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 20
^th
, 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)

A
lmost 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 reconnaissance 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?