Uncle John’s Unstoppable Bathroom Reader (45 page)

Follow the Bouncing Astronaut:
What about the movie footage showing the astronauts demonstrating the moon’s low gravity by bouncing around the surface? Skeptics say that could have easily been faked. In the moon’s gravity—a sixth of Earth’s—the astronauts should have been able to leap 10 feet in the air. But they didn’t.

• In fact, in the movie footage they don’t get any farther off the ground than they could on Earth.

There are more than 90 different scientific theories on how dinosaurs became extinct.

• And if it looks like they are moving in slow motion, that is because they are—half speed to be exact. Bill Wood, a scientist who worked for the NASA subcontractor responsible for recording Apollo signals and sending them to NASA headquarters in Houston, explains that the original film footage, shot at 30 frames per second, was transferred to video, which runs at 60 frames per second. If the film of the astronauts walking on the surface of the moon is viewed at regular speed their movements look remarkably normal.

Moon Rocks:
Besides the photos and film footage, the only physical evidence we have that astronauts actually went to the moon is lunar rocks.

• NASA points to the fact that scientists around the world have examined the rocks brought back by the Apollo missions and have no doubt that they originated on the moon. But the moon isn’t the only place to find such rocks.

• In the ice of Antarctica, scientists have found remnants of lunar rocks blasted off the moon by meteoric impacts. Numerous expeditions have explored the continent for rock samples from the moon, Mars, and comets.

• In 1967, two years before the Apollo mission, such a group visited Antarctica, including ex-Nazi rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, by then working for NASA. Why would a rocket scientist be sent to look for rocks? Was he collecting fake evidence?

WHY FAKE IT?

These anomalies in the “information” given to the public about the Apollo moon missions have caused many to question whether we really did send anyone to the moon. But if the moon landings were faked, how was it done, and why?

The why is fairly easy to understand. The 1960s were the height of the Cold War. The Space Race was on, and the Soviet Union had already beat the United States by launching the first satellite to orbit Earth, the first man—and woman—in space, and the first space walk, among other important achievements. The United States was clearly behind. In 1961 President Kennedy issued a challenge: “I believe this nation should commit itself to achieving a goal, before this decade is out, of sending a man to the moon and returning him safely to the Earth.”

Mae West never kissed her leading men on screen.

The Apollo program was born, and five months before the end of the decade, NASA displayed pictures of Americans on the moon, proof that we had beat the Russians to the most important prize. We won. Mission accomplished.

But was it accomplished by actually sending men to the moon, or just making it look that way?

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Moon

Investigative journalist Bart Sibrel claims to have found a mislabeled NASA film showing multiple “takes” of a scene shown to the public as part of the “live” broadcast of the Apollo 11 flight. In the footage the astronauts appear to be rehearsing the lines the public heard. Sibrel claims to have spent half a million dollars investigating the moon landings, and produced a video called
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Moon
.

In 2002 Sibrel, backed by a Japanese film crew, confronted Buzz Aldrin outside a Beverly Hills hotel and challenged him to swear on a Bible that he had really gone to the moon. Aldrin responded by punching Sibrel in the face.

And what about those marvelous still photos? Many believe they were staged, perhaps in a secret location in Nevada, or even in a giant geodesic soundstage in Australia. Either way it would have been much easier to manipulate the lighting to get the results shown in the moon landing photos.

Would such a monstrous hoax have been easy to pull off? Certainly not. But to some people it seems more possible—and cheaper—than actually sending someone to the moon and back. Consider these statistics: Of the seven manned missions to the Moon, only Apollo 13 had trouble, which is an 86% success rate. In the years since, 25 unmanned craft have been sent to Mars. Only seven have succeeded—a 28% success rate. Which figure seems more realistic?

JUST WHEN YOU THOUGHT IT WAS SAFE

Before you get too comfortable with the idea that the government created a huge hoax because we couldn’t have possibly gone to the moon, keep in mind that there are also people who believe the film
is
fake, but that we actually
did
go to the moon. So why fake it? To cover up what we
really
found there. But that’s another story…

One in five people alive today is Chinese.

LIMERICKS

Limericks have been around since the 1700s. Here are a few of the more “respectable” ones that our BRI readers have sent in.

The one-eyed old painter McNeff

Was color-blind, palsied, and deaf;

When he asked to be touted

The critics all shouted:

“This is art, with a capital F!”

A certain young man of great gumption,

Among cannibals had the presumption

To go—but, alack!

He never came back.

A bona fide case of consumption.

An amoeba named Sam and his brother,

Were having a drink with each other;

In the midst of their quaffing

They split their sides laughing,

And each of them now is a mother.

There once was a fellow named Paul

Who went to a masquerade ball

Dressed up like a tree,

But he failed to foresee

His abuse by the dogs in the hall.

A cheerful old bear at the zoo

Could always find something to do.

When it bored him, you know,

To walk to and fro,

He reversed it and walked fro and to.

There was a faith-healer of Deal

Who said, “Although pain isn’t real,

If I sit on a pin

And it punctures my skin,

I dislike what I think that I feel.”

An amorous dentist named Moss,

Fell in love with the charming Miss Ross;

But he held in abhorrence

Her given name Florence,

So he called her his dear Dental Floss.

A man to whom illness was chronic,

When told that he needed a tonic,

Said, “Oh, Doctor, dear,

Won’t you, please, make it beer?”

“No, no,” said the doc, “that’s
Teu
tonic.”

There was a young lady from Natchez

Who sat in some briar-wood patches.

Now she lies on her face

With an awful grimace

And scratches and scratches and scratches.

There was a young poet from Crewe,

Whose limericks stopped at line two.

Leprosy is the oldest documented infection—first described in Egypt in 1350 B.C.

NOT-SO-WISEGUYS

When people enter the federal government’s Witness Protection Program they’re supposed to hide, right?

W
ISEGUY:
Henry Hill, a member of New York’s Lucchese crime family and participant in the $5.8 million Lufthansa heist from New York’s Kennedy Airport in 1978, the largest cash theft in U.S. history

IN THE PROGRAM:
The Witness Protection Program relocated him to Redmond, Washington, in 1980, and Hill, who’d changed his name to Martin Lewis, was supposed to keep a low profile and stay out of trouble. He wasn’t very good at either—in 1985 he and writer Nicholas Pileggi turned his mob exploits into the bestselling book
Wiseguy,
which became the hit movie
Goodfellas.

WHAT HAPPENED:
When the book became a bestseller, “Martin Lewis” couldn’t resist telling friends and neighbors who he really was. Even worse, he reverted to his life of crime. Since 1980 Hill has racked up a string of arrests for crimes ranging from drunk driving to burglary and assault. In 1987 he tried to sell a pound of cocaine to two undercover Drug Enforcement officers, which got him thrown out of the Witness Protection Program for good.

“Henry couldn’t go straight,” says Deputy Marshal Bud McPherson. “He loved being a wiseguy. He didn’t want to be anything else.”

WISEGUY:
Aladena “Jimmy the Weasel” Fratianno, Mafia hit man and acting head of the Los Angeles mob. When he entered the Witness Protection Program in 1977, Fratianno was the highest-ranking mobster ever to turn informer.

IN THE PROGRAM:
Fratianno has another claim to fame: he is also the highest-paid witness in the history of the program. Between 1977 and 1987, he managed to get the feds to pay for his auto insurance, gas, telephone bills, real-estate taxes, monthly checks to his mother-in-law, and his wife’s facelift and breast implants.

WHAT HAPPENED:
The Justice Department feared the payments made the program look “like a pension fund for aging mobsters,” so he was thrown out of the program in 1987. But by that time, Fratianno had already soaked U.S. taxpayers for an estimated $951,326. “He was an expert at manipulating the system,” McPherson said. Fratianno died in 1993.

Actors are called
thespians
after Thespis, the Greek founder of theater.

WISEGUY:
James Cardinali, a five-time murderer who testified against Gambino crime boss John Gotti at his 1987 murder trial. Gotti, nicknamed the “Teflon Don,” beat the rap, but Cardinali still got to enter the Witness Protection Program after serving a reduced sentence for his own crimes. After his release, federal marshals gave him a new identity and relocated him to Oklahoma.

IN THE PROGRAM:
Witnesses who get new identities aren’t supposed to tell anyone who they really are, and when Cardinali slipped up and told his girlfriend in 1989, the program put him on a bus to Albuquerque, New Mexico, and told him to get lost.

But Cardinali wouldn’t leave quietly. When he got to Albuquerque, he made signs that read “Mob Star Witness” and “Marked to Die by the Justice Department.” Then, wearing the signs as a sandwich board, he marched back and forth in front of the federal courthouse, telling reporters he would continue his protest until he was let back into the program or murdered by mobsters, whichever came first. “If I get killed,” Cardinali told reporters. “I want everybody to see what they do to you.”

WHAT HAPPENED:
Cardinali flew to Washington D.C. to appear on CNN’s
Larry King Live
. But leaving the state violated his parole, so when he got back to New Mexico he was arrested, taken to jail…and released into the custody of the U.S. Marshals Service. Then he vanished. Did he embarrass the Witness Protection Program into letting him back in? The Marshals Service “will neither confirm nor deny” that he did.

WISEGUY:
John Patrick Tully, convicted murderer and member of the Campisi crime family of Newark, New Jersey

IN THE PROGRAM:
Tully served a reduced sentence for murder and entered the Witness Protection Program in the mid-1970s. By the early 1980s, he was living in Austin, Texas, where, as “Jack Johnson,” he worked as a hot dog and fajita vendor. (It was a “nostalgic” choice—years earlier, he’d robbed a bank and used the money to buy a hot dog cart.)

Tully’s business thrived, but he had repeated run-ins with the police and was arrested numerous times for public intoxication and drunk driving. At some point the police figured out who “Mr. Johnson” really was and then, Tully alleges, they started harassing him.

In 1986 a guard in an armored car was killed when $50,000 worth of quarters fell on him.