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60 Greatest Conspiracies of All Time details the theory that NASA faked the Apollo moon landings on a movie soundstage in the Nevada desert. Another strain of space-age skepticism holds that NASA did in fact land men on the moon, but inevitably hushed up the astronauts' stunning discoveries of alien life. The dean of such lunar conspiracy theories is William L. Brian II, an Oregon writer who, according to the blurb on his book, Moongate: Suppressed Findings of the U.S. Space Program, "has the mathematical and conceptual skills to verify the cover-up from a scientific standpoint." Putting those skills to work, Brian has built a methodical case (complete with algebraic proofs--and a plenitude of speculation) for NASA's "monstrous suppression" of the facts about alien intelligence on the moon. But the alien coverup is only a point of departure for Brian, a latter-day paradigm-smasher who intends to rock the foundations of contemporary science, the military-industrial complex, interplanetary history, UFOlogy and the not-so-speculative field (it turns out) of anti-gravity propulsion.
The basis of Brian's cosmic thesis is his claim that NASA is lying when it says the moon's gravity is one-sixth that of the earth. Using calculations too complex to go into here--they're helpfully assembled in Appendix B of his book--Brian purports to prove that NASA learned during the 1960s that the moon's gravitational field was actually a whopping 64 percent as strong as the earth's. The implications of this discovery are staggering, per Brian, staggering enough to warrant one of NASA's patented coverup jobs. For if the moon's gravity is close to that of the earth, Brian explains, not only is Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation all wrong and conventional physics on a "shaky foundation." But strong lunar gravity also means that the moon might be able to sustain an atmosphere, and where there's air, there just might be life. And where there's life, there might also be futuristic sci fi monorails, OK? But we're getting ahead of Brian's proofs of the conspiracy: He has scrutinized films and photographs of Apollo astronauts puttering around the moon and is unimpressed by the so-called "athletic feats" promised by NASA. If you accept NASA's claims, on the moon astronauts would barely nudge the scales at one-sixth of their earth weight. According to Brian's calculations (Appendix F), a 185-pound man wearing a space suit of equal weight should have been able to jump six feet off the ground. Yet apparently white astronauts can't jump, for they never cleared more than a pathetic 18 inches. Brian suggests that NASA used the bulky space suits in an unconvincing attempt to explain away this "anemic jumping." To give the illusion of low-gravity frolicking, NASA probably used "semi-slow motion" photography. On their lunar hikes, why did the astronauts huff and puff like flabby couch potatoes? Under one-sixth gravity, even a lard-butt slacker would have had little trouble bounding along for miles without working up a sweat. As for evidence of an atmosphere, Brian points to the "hard core" proof of Apollo 14, whose astronauts observed their starched American flag billowing ever so slightly, as if in a breeze, you see. The lunar landscape turned out not to be filled with craggy peaks as expected, but was gently rounded, as if eroded by wind and water. Gorges looked for all the world like dry river channels, Brian reports. Certain NASA photos of the moon exhibit signs of atmospheric diffusion, according to Brian's analysis. Did NASA retouch its moon photos to blot out blue sky and replace it with inky black? Then there is the peculiar Apollo 10 photo of the moon from space showing a band of blue haze wrapped around the rocky orb. It does look remarkably like pictures of the earth's atmosphere taken from space. Moreover, Neil Armstrong, upon seeing the moon from this same angle commented, "I can see the sky all around the moon." Hmm. Brian wagers that the moon's atmosphere might be as dense as the earth's, and perhaps even as breathable. "It follows that the [space] suits were probably only used during filming to propagate the cover-up," he submits. Oh yeah?, then what of Apollo 15's recreation of Galileo's famous experiment in which a hammer and feather, dropped on the supposedly airless moon, fell at the same rate? Brian is, of course, undaunted by NASA's trickery: "The feather probably concealed a rather heavy object."
Brian also draws on sources of information somewhat less exacting than his pocket calculator to outline a plot somewhat more conjectural than your average 1950s invaders-from-mars movie. That is, your average 1950s invaders-from-mars movie with a Cold War conscience. For like the space traveler Klaatu in the 1950s sci fi classic, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Brian issues a stern warning to NASA, its military puppet masters and all others who flaunt a "mega-death type of mentality." Submits Brian: "If advanced intelligences exist in the universe which are superior to Earth men, the militarists will eventually meet their match in outer space." Indeed, the astronauts might already have met their alien match, under a blustery moon breeze. Dutifully noting the "questionable" provenance of the information (the National Enquirer), Brian proceeds to report that after Armstrong and Edwin E. "Buzz" Aldrin Jr. landed on the moon, "immense UFOs lined up on the far side of the crater and monitored the astronauts." This story is a standard in UFO lore, and various accounts have Armstrong admitting, off the record, of course, that the place was crawling with alien goons. It seems that UFOs have kept close tabs on NASA's manned space program from the get-go. There are the famous sightings of unidentified bogies, including John Glenn's "fireflies," the luminous particles seen on many a space flight but typically dismissed by wet-blanket NASA coverup artistes as "chipped paint" and not UFO exhaust. There are also the possibly apocryphal, yet always descriptive, sightings by rocket jockeys of "disc-shaped" objects hovering near and/or following NASA space capsules, usually in concert with mysterious equipment failures ("electronic glitches" in NASA's argot of misdirection). Extrapolating from the, well, ambitious claims of 1950s-era UFO contactees George Adamski (author of Flying Saucers Have Landed) and Howard Menger (From Outer Space to You), Brian suggests a not-so-original motive behind the alien stalking of NASA: Nervous about Earth's entry into the nuclear sweepstakes, UFOs were monitoring terrestrial war-making technology. NASA's missions, because they were "decoys" for military research, according to Brian, became a prime target of UFO surveillance. "Human beings. . . have an extremely bad reputation for being killers," Brian editorializes. "How could UFO occupants trust Earth nations to be benevolent when these nations have such war-filled histories and are developing weapons which are more and more powerful?" Adamski and Menger both reported being taken to dome-shaped UFO bases on the moon. For the cratering on the moon, Brian pulls a theory apparently out of the heavenly firmament, explaining that those familiar features are in fact the handiwork of "sophisticated weapons" used in "a terrible war involving the moon," which took place "less than 30,000 years ago." Apparently taking a cue from film maker George Lucas, Brian describes a Star Wars-like scenario in which a hollow planet between Mars and Jupiter was obliterated by high-tech particle beams, leaving behind our latter-day asteroid belt. That asteroid belt planet ("hereafter referred to as Maldek," he writes, somewhat inexplicably) had a moon, which, thanks to "great levitating or gravity-inducing beams" was transported into the orbit of its new host: Planet Earth. These are the only a few of the interplanetary secrets jealously guarded by NASA, which might also know that the Earth and moon, like woebegone "Maldek," are hollow--and therefore prone to destruction by cosmic super weapons. (Which would constitute an injustice to the inhabitants who dwell inside our hollow Earth, another theory proposed by Brian.) Likewise, NASA has yet to come clean on UFO anti-gravity propulsion. Perhaps, Brian meditates aloud, NASA itself has mastered such science fiction technology for use in its own moon vehicles; this might also explain the government's official silence on the subject of UFOs. NASA might also know that a number of moons and planets in the solar system are inhabited by people with superior technologies, "We can hope," Brian concludes with a note of Cold War foreboding, "that these people will keep the superpowers in check, since the use of space for military purposes could eventually lead to our destruction." Brian's theories echo another wing of aerospace conspiracy conjecture, the insanely sweeping "Alternative 3" plot. Alternative 3 began as a hoax, a fictional parody of the conspiracy mindset aired as a "mockumentary" on British television in 1977. But the sinister (and satirical) allegations soon developed a cult following among literal-minded conspiratologists. As "exposed" by a gaggle of whistleblowers (like alcoholic former astronaut "Bob Grodin") on Britain's Anglia TV, Alternative 3 was a plot hatched by a global klatch of blue bloods to abandon the polluted, overpopulated planet Earth to the stinking masses. Alternatives 1 and 2, scrapped as impractical by NASA and its international overlords, would have involved exploding nuclear bombs in the sky to burn off atmospheric pollution and building vast subterranean cities, respectively. The more pragmatic Alternative 3, however, was a plan to spirit Earthling elitists and unsuspecting "batch consignments"--hapless rubes abducted by terrestrial UFOs and enslaved via mind control--to domed cities on the moon and Mars. As an American plotter puts it in a transcript uncloaked by Anglia TV's journalistic stalwarts: "Ethics! What the hell do some of these guys think we're all at! Jesus! We're smack in the middle of the most vital exercise ever mounted. . . with the survival of the whole human race swinging on it. . . and they bleat about ethics." Despite the fact that Alternative 3 was more wicked satire than evil master plan, some conspiracy trackers remain suspicious. In his recent volume, Casebook on Alternative 3, conspiracy sentry Jim Keith expertly debunks the "poorly done, science fictional hoax" and then proceeds to demonstrate over the course of 159 pages that the British production was actually "fiction based on fact." Alternative 3 "is right about one thing," Keith muses apocalyptically. "Smart money is on the end of the world." Well, come to think of it, Biosphere 2, that very real quasi-scientific experiment in the Arizona desert in which seven men and women donned Star Trekkish jump suits and sealed themselves inside a domed eco-cosm for two years, is an eerie parallel to the Alternative 3 plot. In fact, the Biosphereans' authoritarian leader was a Southwestern cultist who initially described the experiment as the next phase in human evolution, a preparation for humankind's inevitable migration to Mars.
MAJOR SOURCES Brian, William L. Moongate: Suppressed Findings of the U.S. Space Program‹The NASA-Military Cover-Up. Portland, OR: Future Science Research Publishing Co., 1982. Keith, Jim. Casebook on Alternative 3: UFOs, Secret Societies and World Control. Lilburn, GA: IllumiNet Press, 1994.