By Joseph F. Goodavage

SAGA Investigates the Unsolved Mysteries of our Apollo Space Program

Strange “lights” seen by every astronaut in space? An object that “attacked” Apollo 15 astronauts David Scott and Jomes Irwin? Artificial dome-like structures, and tracks on the moon? A secret search for alien artifacts? Evidence of an extra lunar orbiting vehicle not of terrestrial origin? It may sound like science fiction, but it’s all from NASA files and Apollo mission transmissions. And, whenever Something really startling was about to be revealed, the astronauts and mission control switched to code or a restricted radio band. What is our government desperately trying to hide from us?

When it’s all carefully weighed, the pre­ponderant evidence points to one mistak­able conclusion: there is an artifact (or ar­tifacts) of nonhuman design on the Moon!

GROUND TO AIR TRANSMISSION, Apollo 17

CMP (Command Module Pilot): The domical structures are partially filled up to the breach. In other words, the breach has either flowed into .these little domical structures before they were built or the domes are younger than the floor itself.

CC (Capcom ): Go ahead, Ron, [Ronald E. Evans].

CMP: O. K., Robert. I guess the big thing I want to report from the back side on this one is that I took another look at the-the-cloverleaf in Aitken with the binocs. And that southern dome (garble) has a breach to the east.

CC: We copy that, Ron. Is there any difference in the color of the dome and the Mare in Aitken there?

CMP: Yes, there is . . That’s Con­dor, Condorsey, or Condorcet-or whatever you want to call it there. Condorcet Hotel is the one that has got the diamond-shaped fill down .in the-uh-floor.

CC: Roger. Understand. Condorcet Hotel.

CMP: Condor. Condorcet Alpha. They’ve either caught a landslide on it or it’s got a-and it doesn’t look like (garble) on the other side of the wall on the northwest side.

CC: 0.K., we copy that. Northwest wall of Condorcet A.

CMP: The area is oval or elliptical in shape. Of course, the ellipse is to­ward the top.

This mysterious transcription was taken directly from NASA files. Like others of its kind, it poses a maddening dilemma for anyone trying to interpret the trans­missions. There are so many persistent questions about the Apollo lunar ex­peditions-those flashes of light the as­tronauts kept seeing, for instance, their mysterious conversations about “huge blocks” lined up in east-west direction and “buildings,” “roads,” “tracks,” and “structures” found on the floors of vari­ous craters. In the above transmission, for example, the Command Module Pilot says “the breach flowed into these little domical structures before they were built
… ” Built?

There was also an “attack” on the as­tronauts by “something that flew” across the lunar surface. At another time, one astronaut (Harrison Schmitt of Apollo 17) yelped excitedly. “I see tracks-running right up the wall of the crater.” It was fol­lowed by this tantalizing response: ·”We copy, Gene [Cernan]. Your photopath runs directly between Pierce and Pease. Pierce Bravo, go to Bravo, Whisky, Whis­ky, Romeo.”

Whatever that was supposed to mean, there weren’t any other references to the mysterious “tracks” on that mission. In fact, whenever something was dis­covered, the astronauts and Capcom (Captain of Communications), apparently switched to a prearranged code, sometimes even on an alternate publicly unmo­nitorable channel.

APOLLO 15, Aug. 1, 1971

David SCOTT: . . Arrowhead really runs east to west.

CAPCOM: Roger, we copy.

(James) IRWIN: Tracks here as we go down slope.

CAPCOM: Just follow the tracks, huh?

IRWIN: Right we’re (garble). We know that’s a fairly good run. We’re bearing 320, hitting 350 on range for 413 … I can’t get over those line­ations, that layering at Mount Hadley.

SCOTT: I can’t either. That’s really spectacular.

IRWIN: They sure look beautiful.

SCOTT: Talk about organization!

IRWIN: That’s the most organized structure I’ve ever seen!

SCOTT: It’s (garble) so uniform in width.

IRWIN: Nothing we’ve seen before this has shown such uniform thick­ness from the’ top of the tracks to the bottom.

That’s just a small sample of why I was eager to learn all I could from the tran­scripts of the Apollo program. During an earlier luncheon meeting with SAGA’s editor Marty Singer, I learned he was just as piqued about it as I was. “Nothing adds up,” he said. “First, why did NASA refuse to release the autopsy reports on astronauts killed in car accidents and plane crashes? Now they’ve found orange soil on the Moon that looks like rust. How can there be rust on the Moon?”

“There can’t be,” I said, “unless there’s iron and water and oxygen and free hydrogen …”

“Which there isn’t supposed to be,” he filled in.

I agreed. “Or volcanic action, which the experts always assured us didn’t exist on the Moon.”

“Except that it does.”

He went over a familiar list of anomalies from the Moon landings: strange “lights” seen by every astronaut in space; the UFO that Astronaut Ken Mattingly saw disappearing behind the lunar horizon as he orbited the Moon during Apollo 16; the object that flashed across the lunar sky, barely missing Apollo 15 astronauts Da­vid Scott and James Irwin; and the mys­terious “mascons” (massive concentra­tions of matter within the moon with mag­netic and gravitic anomalies) that dis­torted the orbits of every lunar vehicle.

That’s just for openers. The really in­triguing bits of information came later: a covert search for alien arti­facts – something “planted” on the Moon by beings from another culture-and evi­dence of an extraterrestrial vehicle in lu­nar orbit!

The typed, mimeographed transcript of conversations between Houston Ground Control and all the astronauts who had been to the Moon and back were enough to fill a room, but here’s another example of what a rich harvest they yielded after many days of digging.

APOLLO 15

CAPCOM: You talked about some­thing mysterious …

ORION: O.K., Gordy, when we pitched around, I’d like to tell you about something we saw around the LM. When we were coming about 30 or 40 feet out, there were a lot of ob­jects- Nh ite things-flying by. It look­ed like they were coming-it looked like they were being propelled or ejected, but I’m not convinced of that.

CAPCOM: We copy that Charlie.

” … it looked like they were being pro­pelled or ejected … ” By what? By in­telligent life from other worlds? And, what would our reaction be to the first “face-to-face” contact with nonhuman In­telligent Beings? The very knowledge of their existence-especially if they were as superior to us as we are to canines -might plunge us into deep psy­chological shock.

ITEM: After an 18-month study, Josef F. Blumrlch, an engineer at the Marshall Space Fllght Center In Huntsville, Ala., concluded that the Earth and Moon have been visited regularly by extraterrestrial Beings, and that we will soon find arti­facts placed by them on the Moon.

“The reason we’re not getting any sig­nals from space,” said Harvard astrono­mer John R. Ball, “is that our fellow in­habitants of the galaxy may have put us into a kind of galactic zoo or wildlife pre­serve.”

(Or if they are trying to establish con­tact, they might have the problem of de­termining which species is the intelligent one: To imagine the enormous problem faced by an alien visitor trying to find in­telligent life, all we need do is recall our· own inability to recognize dolphin in­telligence. We always relate intelligence and thinking with toolmaking. This just doesn’t apply where dolphins are con­cerned.)

“Communication with us may be for­bidden,” Dr. Ball continued, “so as not to disturb our ecology and foul up the ob­servations of behavioral or biological sci­entists of other worlds .. ·. a more gro­tesque and morbid possibility is that we may be in. a laboratory situation being managed by some extraterrestrial beings.”

Dr. Francis H. Crick, a molecular bio­logist at Cambridge University in England, added, “Perhaps life on Earth never was-as the evolutionists believe -spontaneously generated.” In a schol­arly paper titled “Directed Panspermia,” he and an associate, Dr. L. E. Orgel of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in San Diego, Calif., soberly suggest that human and other life forms were specially created for Earth by a fantastic race of su­per-Beings who experimented with early models (trilobites, dinosaurs, and other extinct giant reptiles) until they suc­ceeded in breeding simians with much larger brains, Homo sapiens-mankind.

If that $ounds familiar, it should; a sim­ilar theme was developed in science fic­tion stories by Arthur C. Clarke (Child­hood’s End and The Sentinel). They were the basis for 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick’s film about the dis­covery of an artifact placed on the Moon by an intelligent alien race millions of years ago to monitor humanity’s progress and to alert the Aliens when we evolved into a space-faring race.

ITEM: According to British space sci­entist G. V. Foster, there are alien struc­tures on the surface of the Moon and elsewhere in the solar system waiting to be discovered by human beings.

APOLLO 16

ORION: Orion has landed. I can’t see how far the (garble) … this is a blocked field we’re in from the south ray-tremendous difference in al­bedo. I just get the feeling that these rocks may have come from some­where else. Everywhere we saw the ground, which is about the whole sunlit side, you had the same delin­eation the Apollo 15 photography showed on Hadley, Delta and Hadley Mountains … .

CAPCOM: O.K. Go ahead.

ORION: I’m looking out here at Stone Mountain and it’s got..:…it looks like somebody has been out there plowing across the side of it. The beaches-the benches-look like one sort of terrace after another, right up the side. They sort of follow the contour of it right around.

CAPCOM: Any difference in the terraces?

ORION: No, Tony. Not that I could tell from here. These terraces could be raised out of (garble) or some­thing like that. …

CASPER (Mattingly in lunar orbit overhead): Another strange sight over here. It looks-a flashing light-I think it’s Ann bell. Another crater here looks as though it’s flooded except that this same material seems to run up on the outside. You can see a defi­nite patch of this stuff that’s run down inside. And that material lays or has been structured on top of it, but it lays on top of things that are outside and’ higher. It’s a very strange oper­ation.

Whatever the real explanation for “beaches, domes, hotels,” and other “structures,” most NASA spokesmen say they’re metaphors for natural formations. Not all, however. There’s another school including NASA exobiologists who be­lieve the Earth has had extraterrestrial visitors who may have_ left traces of their presence.

They might have even built a memorial to themselves, or left _a message to the Earth’s future inhabitants. (O·n a metallic chip, for instance, we can now write an enormous wealth of knowledge; not much space would be required to leave a rich li­brary inside some relatively indestructible vault.)

“Such a legacy,” said Cornell Univer­sity astrophysicist, Carl Sagan, “would be of enormous benefit to our species-a kind of colossal Pharaoh’s tomb contain­ing new science and new cultures. Dis­covery of such a legacy could be the most important event in history.” Something like that may have been left in distant or­bit-or on the Moon.

Complicating the argument that in­telligent aliens may have left a legacy on Earth is the erosion process of wind and water and land changes and the effects they wou’ld have on alien artifacts. Per­haps the aliens came from a water world and would naturally seek intelligence in our oceans. But submarine erosion is just as destructive as that on land. Any kind of artifact would have to be placed as far as possible from areas of earthquake activi­ty, far from the oceans, and away from accidental damage by large animals. Star-roving aliens would probably have a good deal of knowledge about the struc­ture of planets, continental drift, earth­quakes, volcanic eruptions, hurricanes, tidal waves and floods.

So what would they do? Their cartogra­phers (assuming they developed meth­ods of measuring and studying planets similar to ours) would soon tell them that only two places on Earth seemed relative­ly free from disastrous change-the inte­rior desert of Australia and some south­ern parts of the Mongolian plateau.

Still, as the bright boys at the Rand Corporation “think tank” discovered when they were faced with the question of the existence of intelligent aliens, “we just don’t know who (or what) we are dealing with.” Prof. Josif Shklovsky, head of Ra­dio Astronomy at Moscow State Univer-sity, said “It would be impossible to guess the form and size such intelligence would take. ” So what kind of artifact would they leave? More important, how would we recognize it?

According to science author Greg Ben­son, in a recent article in Vertex, “Highly advanced technology is pretty much the same as magic; we should always be pre­pared to be surprised. Size alooe is an easy way to an,nounce your presence, yes, but building things the size of moun­tains?-well, we ought to look for a more subtle beacon.”

What about regular arrangements of natural objects or differences in the quali­ty of the light they reflect? But what kind· of regular arrangements and light? The possibilities are virtually endless. We can’t anticipate detailed questions about the inventiveness of alien minds. The best we can do is to launch a thorough search for the unexpected. As Benson puts it, “A curious arrangement of a ridge line, a concentric pattern of rock formations, perhaps an abnormally high’reflectivity in the ultraviolet-any of these could be pure accident or, on the other hand, the first subtle.clue.”

ITEM: Farouk El Baz, the NASA scien­tist who taught geology to the Apollo as­tronauts admits he’s “completely baf­fled” by some of the experiences they’ve had. “We may be looking at artifacts from extraterrestrial visitors without rec­ognizing them.”

APOLLO 16, Ground to Air

CAPCOM: What about the albedo change in the subsurface soil? Of course you saw it first at Flagg and were probably more excited about it there. Was there any difference in it there-and Buster and Alsep and LM?

DUKE: No. Around the Alsep it was just in spots. At Plum it seemed to be everywhere. My predominant impres­sion was that the white albedo was (garble) than the fine cover on top.

CAPCOM: O.K.· Just a question now for you, John. When you got to halfway, or even thought it was half­way, we understand you looped around south, is that right?

YOUNG: That’s affirm. We came upon-Barbara.

Barbara? That really needed some ex­planation, so I made an appointment with NASA geologist Farouk El Baz at the .Na­tional Aeronautics and Space Museum. Here’s how part of our conversation went:

SAGA: What do you suppose Young meant when he said they came upon “Barbara “?

El Baz: I can’t really say. Code, per­haps.

SAGA: Does “Barbara” have some kind of geological significance?

El Baz: All I can say about that Is that not every discovery ha·s been an­nounced. There are many undisco­vered caverns beneath the surface of the Moon, for example. Several ex­periments have been flown to the Moon to see if there actually were such caverns, and also to learn whether we had subsurface layers of permafrost-actual ice.

SAGA: But Barbara is an odd name for something on the Moon, isn’t it?

El Baz: Yes, an enigma: As I sug­gested, perhaps a code, but I don’t really know. Conditions on the Moon are-quite different-very different. We’r e looking for·something -something … Well, subsurface water and · a huge, bridgelike struc­ture in Mare Crisium have been re­ported. If water had formed below the surface of the Moon, we’d have ex­actly the same kind of evidence we now have. That is all I can say about it.

SAGA: Are you saying that it was a bridge-that you’ve actually found artificial structures or some kind of intelligently-placed artifact?

El Baz: No. No, I am not admitting such a thing. But when you start to think about it, almost anything is pos­sible. There are almost no limits on how you can interpret the many things astronomers have been ob­serving and reporting for .several centuries. Now the astronauts are seeing many anomalies close up.

SAGA: What are some of the ano­malies found on, in, or around the Moon that can’t be explained natural­ly?

El Baz: The one th”ing I can’t ex­plain-tliat I do not· know about or what it could be are these enormous flashes of light. There’s no question about it, they are very tremendous things, not comets, not natural. Three were seen over the western part of the Moon, one by Ken Mattingly on Apollo 16 and two by Ron Evans and Jack Schmidt on Apollo 17.

APOLLO 17, Ground to Air

LMP: What are you learning?

CC: Hot spots on the Moon, Jack.

LMP: Where are your big ano­malies? Can you summarize quickly?_

CC: Jack, we’ll get that for you on the next pass.

CMP: Hey, I can see a bright spot down there on the landing site where they might have blown off some ‘Of that halo stuff.

CC: Roger. In teresting. Very-go to Kilo Kilo.

CMP: Hey, it’s gray now and the number one extends …

CC: Roger. We got it. And we copy that it’s all on the way out down there. Go to Kilo Kilo on that.

CMP: Mode is going to HM. Recorder is off. Lose a little com­munication there, huh? Okay, there’s Bravo, Bravo, select OMNI. Hey, you know, you’ll nevs er believe it. I’m right over the edge of Orientale. I just looked down and saw the light flash again.

CC: Roger. Understand. CMP: Right at the, end of the rille.

CC: Any chance of-:–? C

MP: That’s on the east of Ori­entale.

CC: You don’t suppose it could be Vostok? [a Russian probe.]

CMP: I’ll be damned. I’ve got to mark that spot on the map!

In 1898, a huge, unidentified object was seen in the vicinity of the Aristarchus lu­nar crater. In 1912 a gigantic black object, estimated to be 50 miles in diameter was reported by American astronomer F. 8. Harris. On Mar. 30, 1950, a British as­tronomer named Dr. Percy Wilki.ns saw a large, oval-shaped glow on the plain of Aristarchus. In October 1958, British, So­viet, and American astronomers detected something speeding toward the Moon at better than 25,000 miles per hour; it emitted signals no one could •interpret. Hundreds of similar reports have been made through the years. Bright flashes of light h_ave been reported by both astrono­mers on Earth and by astronauts close up. Could these anomalies be objects de­liberately placed on the Moon to attract our attention?

According to British space scientist G. V. Foster, “In reality, such artifact devices may. well embody the techniques and ‘principles of superhuman knowledge. Al­most certainly, we will soon encounter these objects on the Moon.”

Any creatures. able to voyage among the stars and land on other planets must have a technology we probably wouldn’t even recognize, let alone understand. Then again, they’d probably be so differ­ent from anything we’ve ever imagined, having· evolved under conditions we couldn’t even guess at…

Still, it won’t be necessary to l!c)arn ev­ery detail of an alien visitor’s background and behavior. All we need is to determine if such al fens have left anything behind we can construe as a calling card-an artifact ‘that would survive over long periods of time, but would still be recognizable as something artificial.

Along with Erich von Daniken’s best-seller, Chariot of the Gods? (the myths, legends, and evidence of ancient extraterrestrial visits) and most religious beliefs that place “gods” in the sky or be­neath the Earth, more and more.scientists are now conjecturing that the stories in the Bible are actually versions of such alien visits.

An artifact left by such visitors might trigger some kind of warning to alert the extraterrestrials when we had reached a fairly high degree of technological sophis­tication. They might want advance notice that we had discovered atomic energy, say, or space travel. From their viewpoint it would be better than learning about it when we come visiting them!

What would we know about such Beings? For one thing, .their travels through the galaxy would give them cer­tain insights and perspectives on the rise and character of civilizations completely unlike their own. Thus, they would prob-· ably leave some indication or sign that You Are Not Alone in the Universe.

On the other hand, the artifact they leave might be a “legacy”-something that would store and ev.entually transmit valuable scientific information. And it’s a distinct possibility that such artifacts could be placed on the Moon· by robots and enormously complex alien comput­ers. If Scotland’s Prof. Duncan Lunan’s evidence and calculations are correJ;:t, that i!I actually the ca.se. In fact, NASA officials and astronomers of all na­tions are paying very respectful attention to this University of Glasgow astronomer., He recently presented persuasive evi­dence that an alien society has placed a probe in orbi’ around our Moon! In. his re­search paper in the· Journal of the presti­gious British Interplanetary Society, Pro-· fessor Lunan announced that the probe is broadcasting signals to us; moreover, he interpreted the radio message it is beam­ing earthward. Here’s the amazing trans­lation:

Start here. Our home is-Epsilon Bootes which is a double star. We live on the sixth planet of seven. Check that-t6e sixth.of seven counting outwards from the Sun, which is the larger of the two.

Our planet has one moon. Our fourth planet has three. Our first and third plan­ets have each one.

Our probe is in the orbit of your Moon. This updates the position of Arcturis known in our maps. (For additional evi­dence that Epsilon Bootes is one source of intelligent life see the July, 1973, SAGA, “UFO Star Bases Discovered’;.)

In the mid-60s radio astronomers dis­coverecl a small body, not visible to tele­scopes, orbiting 60 degrees behind the Moon. They measured its distance and logged its .speed (the velocity of the Moon) by listening for echoes of radio and radar waves beamed in that sector.

But the story goes back many years. NASA’s lunar experts are rechecking a series of unexplained radio echoes heard in 1927, 1928, and 1934. Other echoes were detected by French, Dutch, and Nora wegian radio researchers Who trans­m’itted a series of telegraphic code broad­casts and received two sets of echoes. It took one-seventh of a second for the re­turn of the first echo, the exact time it takes to bounce a radio wave off the ion­osphere. ..I

Lunan figures that because a second set of echoes came back after delays of three to 15 seconds, the messages could have been intercepted, interpreted, and then rebroadcast “by an object or in- telligence circling the Moon.” .

At first the professor couldn’t fathom this discrepancy, but then figured that the delays cou Id be coded messages. It seemed to make fairly good sense. No­body _knows what kind of radio fre­quencies an alien intelligence might use, but a reflection of our own radio mes­sages is something we’d be able to inter- p.

In 1968, Prof. Ronald N. Bracewell, an astronomer at Stanford University, sug­gested that a probe attempting to contact us might try to broadcast a map of the star constellations. Lunan took up Brace­well’s idea and prepared a graph on which he drew the periods of delays as dots.

“To my astonishment,” Lunan told newsmen, “the dots made up a map of an easily-recognized constellation-the Con­stellation of Bootes in the northern sky. The curious pattern of delayed echoes was a pattern of star positions!”

Other researchers charted still more delayed echoes, and Lunan interpreted them as six different star maps. Every one of the reference lines points. to a star called Epsilon Bootes, which he believes is the point of origin of the Alien Moon probe.

But here’s the rub: Epsilon Bootes is 103 million light-years away-far beyond our galaxy. Even at the speed of light a round trip (of radio waves or by any other means) would take 206 million light-years. Nothing we know of, and cer­tainly no living creature or organization of entities that we can imagine, is capable of cohesion for such a vast period of time.

“What we have here,” said Terence Nonweiler, a professor of aerodynamics at the University of Glasgow, is the inter­esting possibility that intelligent Beings are able to visit any part of the galaxy–or other galaxies-at thousands or even mil­lions of times the speed of light.”

This is no pipe dream as far as NASA scientists are concerned. At a high prior­ity secret conference in Green Bank, W. Va., some of the top experts from a wide range of disciplines agreed on a formula that calculated up to 50 million civ­ilizations in our galaxy! And Roger A. MacGowan an important NASA official in Redstone, Ala., who used the most recent astronomical developments as his base, arrived at a figure of 130 billion possible civilizations in the known Universe. These are some of the more conservative esti­mates.

Soviet scientist K. P. Stanyukovich, one of the most farsighted members of the Soviet Commission for Interplanetary Communications, has planned a space “sonde” propelled by nuclear-powered photon drive. The faster the light particles aboard such a “flying lamp” are ejected, the faster the vehicle goes. As its velocity increases, so does its volume, but time slows down for the vessel and all aboard. According to Einstein’s equations, the passengers and crew of such a ship could reach the _heart of the galaxy-a distance of 75,000 light-years-after only 21 years (their subjective time). It would take only 28 years ·10 reach Adromeda, the nearest galaxy, which is 2,250,000 light-years away!

The alien probe in orbit around the Moon, according to some NASA officials, could contain the secrets of FTL (faster than light) travel and other fantastically important knowledge. But time is running out for NASA, according to congressional critics. Apollo’s funds have been termi­nated alqng with the program. With Pro­fessor Lunan’s exciting theory, however, another infusion of lifeblood may be in the offing. NASA officials are bursting to go back and take another look for alien arti­facts without waiting a decade or more to start another Apollo program.

An alien artifact in lunar orbit could be just the thing to help accomplish that.