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May 14, 1996 - Art Bell
01:23:58
Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - Richard Hoagland & Edgar Mitchell - Moon Debate (missing last hour)
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Time Text
Now, let me bring these two gentlemen on the air and see if we can properly connect.
First, from Florida, Dr. Edgar Mitchell.
Doctor, are you there?
I'm here, Richard.
Excellent.
All right, and let me see if I can bring Richard on the air as well.
From New York City, I think.
Is that where you are, Richard?
Well, overlooking New York City.
Overlooking New York City, all right.
Welcome to the program.
You're both on the air.
What I thought I would do before we even begin Yeah, I think you should say it.
to agree to one thing. I've had some recent guests on the air who have suggested and it
has been suggested for a very long time that we never went to the moon. Never went at all.
The whole thing was done on a Hollywood stage. Would you both agree that's poppycock?
Yeah, I think we should say that. I think I can agree that's poppycock.
I think I can agree too.
All right.
So we start on a point of agreement.
Otherwise, what I'd like to do is let this be fairly freewheeling and let you two have what... Doctor, you did receive the photographs Richard sent, correct?
Yes, I did.
I received a computer disk.
I have it running to my computer and I want to hear Richard describe what he has there.
All right.
Richard?
I'd like to hear what Ann has to say about what we saw and sent.
I'd like to know what we're looking for.
I will make the statement that I saw no unusual artifacts, unnatural artifacts and so if Richard thinks that there's evidence that they're there, I need to know what he considers that evidence.
All right, those photographs are on my World Wide Web page and a lot of people have them.
So they can sit out there and look at them as Richard describes what you should be seeing or what he thinks is there.
Richard?
Okay.
First of all, Ed, it's nice to talk to you.
It's been some time.
It hasn't been quite 25 years, but it's been a long time.
The last time I saw you was with Carol Rosin, as a matter of fact.
We were at the same event in New York here about seven or eight years ago or less talking about the Pyramids.
On Mars you mean?
No, talking about the Pyramids.
I'm trying to even think of the producer's name.
Talking about the chamber under the Pyramids.
There was a meeting.
Possibly the Sphinx?
The Sphinx.
Oh, this is the Genes of Hortelio, right?
Yes.
That's the last time we were in the same room, I believe.
But it's good to see you.
Okay, this is a little difficult for me because there's been a lot of things said in absentia
that I have not said myself.
Let me put on record what my thesis is.
I'm going to give you a little bit of a hint.
I'm going to give you a hint.
All right?
Good.
I was with Tronchite, as you're aware.
I covered, as part of, you know, the First Amendment, this extraordinary effort that this nation underwent.
I remember vividly being at the Cape during Euron Shepard's mission and Sturrus's mission.
When you left that morning, we were wandering through the old museum I was in the company of Phil Chapman, and it was at that moment, literally a few minutes before you left for the moon, that Phil and a gal named Sheila Scott and I conceived of the idea of helping her fly across the North Pole, waiting for you to launch.
And she eventually went along with a Piper Aztec to do that, I believe some months later during the summer of 71.
So I have a lot of reasons to remember your mission, not the least of which was because you went where you went.
And it is stunning to me to look back in retrospect now and look at this data which has come to us, these photographs that were sequestered away in part by one of your own, Ken Johnston.
Discern what I think is some pretty amazing information.
And before people jump to conclusions, I have not said, nor I do not believe, with absolute certainty, that what we are seeing in these pictures, the Apollo crews themselves, at that moment on the Moon, could discern.
And the reason is that what we have done is to take these original prints, which Ken Johnston has provided, And we have put them through a computer process, which involves scanning and enhancement, which is the bringing out of very faint details that are down in the gray levels of these emulsions.
And because we don't have absolute standards, because we don't have photometric standards, all I can say is that qualitatively, the things we're seeing in the images, even if you were on the moon, standing there, without helmet or faceplate or anything would be very faint and it is totally within the physics as I understand it that you could be in the middle of these things and not notice if you were not looking and that is something that's very important for people to understand there is no physical reason a priori to automatically assume
That Ed and I are on a different page just because he was there and he says he did not notice anything.
There are many times in science when discoveries are made after the fact.
When years have intervened.
When the emotions of the moment are not there.
When other techniques and technologies have been developed.
Where information is discovered in retrospect that was missed by honest, sincere men and Who were there at the time and who were looking for other things.
So with that as the frame, what I am struck by on these images is the fact that there is discernible geometrical material above the lunar horizon that should not exist.
And the most impressive piece of evidence, the most impressive single thing that I sent you a couple days ago is that panorama.
And I sent you There are four different versions of it, which is up on the website.
It is a 360-degree series of handheld photographs taken by Shepard when you were out erecting the TV camera north of the Antares, stretching completely around the lunar horizon from a position just in front of the front porch of the lab.
It was created at the Manned Spacecraft Center.
By someone in the photo lab physically cutting the individual prints apart and putting them physically together, pasting them on a board to make one of these 360 panoramas where you basically turn around in a circle and take a picture, picture, picture, picture.
And then it was re-photographed.
And that print, we actually have a series of prints of those particular mosaics, was then Put away in an archive at the Oklahoma City University by Ken Johnston, Jr., roughly 1972, and extracted just about a year ago and given to us to be looked at.
It is the skin of that panorama which shows a rather remarkable brightening and bluish scattering above the horizon in a 360 degree mosaic.
And the fact that the brightening is dependent on the angle to the sun.
In the down sun position, it is brightest due west of the spacecraft.
At 90 degrees north and south, the brightening is much less and falls off dramatically.
In fact, it looks, on those enhancements, even black in some sections.
And then toward the sun, behind the lunar module, behind the Antares, it brightens up again.
Which is totally consistent with scattering, scattering functions in some kind of material above the horizon, made, created by something on these separate images that were put together, pasted physically together in this one 306 degree panorama.
And without actually having the original photographs to examine, It's difficult, I know, to come to any absolute conclusion, but I'm just curious, as a physicist, Ed, how, apart from, you know, scattering in a lab, you can explain the function of the scattering on that panorama, and more important, the geometry of the detail within the scattering above the horizon.
Okay, Dick, I can't agree with... I cannot disagree with anything you've said.
Not to this point.
The question now is in looking at those pictures, just exactly what is it you think is there and what is its configuration, what some description of whatever structuring, whatever you discern, conclusions you come from looking at this.
Well, we know from our models of the moon, before you guys even left, that nothing like that should be physically above the horizon.
Exactly.
That you landed on an airless, small world, roughly 2,000 miles across, that there isn't sufficient gravity.
And that's another one of the interesting, weird, disinformation things out there, that the lunar gravity is much greater than NASA told us and all that.
I can say categorically tonight that the numbers and the calculations and the observations
and even the experiments that were done unquestionably categorically refute all of that nonsense.
The lunar surface gravity is one-sixth that of Earth.
Phil Chapa and I, by the way, during your mission, actually it was during, yeah, it
began in your mission.
We kind of conceived of an experiment which Dave Scott actually carried out in July of
71, which was the hammer and the feather.
Right.
So, we know that the things fall on the moon at one-sixth the rate they do on the Earth, they accelerate.
There are some wonderful live TV sequences where the collection bags, I'm thinking on one sequence during Apollo 17, where the collection bags of the rocks is swinging like a pendulum from the ladder of the Lamb.
And there are other ways of measuring lunar gravity.
So we know the physics.
We know the physics of the moon.
We know that it's 160.
Therefore, any atmosphere that it ever had, according to the Jeans Theory, left billions of years ago.
So it should be absolutely airless.
So if we're seeing scattering above the horizon and geometric scattering, we're forced to the conclusion that it's one of two things.
It's either an artifact in the camera in terms of sun reflections within the lens itself, or it was introduced in the laboratory, in Dick Underwood's laboratory on Earth when the photos were made, or it's real structure above the moon photographed by you and Shepard.
And the art form, the science here, is to discern which of those three alternatives is the correct alternative.
Okay.
If it is above the surface, as you're proposing.
Let me add one more thing.
It also, in this model, has to be a long distance away from the camera.
When you're looking parallel to the horizon, you're basically looking tangent to the moon.
Straight out.
We know this from our experience, and most of us were not where you were, so you have to look at the rest of your experience.
We know that at sunset and sunrise, the sun looks distorted, and the moon looks distorted when it rises, because you're looking through a long air path, a lot of air, roughly, I think about 600 miles is the tangent path, before you get out into space where there is no air.
That's why moonrises and sunrises are distorted.
That's why you have interesting effects at sunrise and sunset that you don't have at high noon.
You're looking through a lot of air.
Totally agree.
On the moon, if we're looking through very, very, very, very, very ancient, deteriorated, battered, and meteor-eroded glass, which is the model here.
I say domes.
People think salad bowls.
It's much more ragged and deteriorated than that.
Then the best chance of seeing that kind of structure would be horizontally, where you're looking through a long pathway of a lot of stuff accumulating light scattering over many, many, many miles before the ray gets out into space where there is no stuff.
Okay, if you say a long distance away, let me be very clear.
What do you mean by a long distance?
Are you talking in, say, Booner module radii?
Or several hundreds of meters?
What dimension, what relative dimension are you speaking of?
Oh, I think we're talking miles here, and tens of miles.
Pyrotek, who is one of our architects, who has coordinated measurements of the surface photography with the orbital photography from other missions, and I've restricted our discussion, per your request, to only Apollo 14 tonight, so I haven't We're putting it down here so we know in agreement what we're talking about.
So he was able to do this and he comes up with tens of miles away from the spacecraft
and tens of miles thickness which gives us a very small optical depth over a very long
pathway.
Okay, now we're getting to, we're pinning it down here so we know in agreement what
we're talking about.
Then you're suggesting that there are the remnants of a structure that is surrounding
that area, is that correct?
That is clearly a mile away.
And miles away.
And miles away.
And does it at some point touch the lunar surface or are we still talking about something in the lunar quote atmosphere, the lunar environment that's above the surface?
No, it touches the lunar surface, and if you look in the photograph, 9301C or CC, I remember how I coded these, that's the close-up of you putting up the camera.
It's a companion to one of the frames in the mosaic.
It's not the same frame as the mosaic, it was taken a few seconds earlier or later, we don't know which.
If you look at the inset, that rectangular inset, you will see a series of lighter and, in the model, denser slanted structure impacting the horizon to the north of the lamp, coming down at the horizon.
And it appears that this slanted buttress-like Geometry is indicative of how this stuff reaches the surface.
But that is miles away, according to our numbers and physics calculations.
Shouldn't this be visible in quite a number of these photographs?
Yeah, of course, depending upon the exposure.
And when you say the number, you mean the number that I sent you or the number... Well, any number of photographs.
Uh, and if it's a dome of some sort, I mean, that's what comes to mind as I hear your description here.
I think Bucky Fuller.
Okay.
I think shattered Bucky Fuller.
All right.
And somehow we had to get inside of it.
That's right.
How did we possibly get inside of it?
Well, I presume that it's got tremendous amounts of holes and you safely came down through, uh, you know, pretty open structure.
In other words, the reason that this is apparent at all is when you look parallel to the horizon, you're looking a long way away, tens of miles, and the optical depth gets sufficient where you can see it.
All right, gentlemen, I've got a break in here.
We've got a break at the bottom of the hour.
Everybody take a deep breath, and we'll be right back.
My guests, Richard C. Hoagland and Dr. Edgar Mitchell, the Apollo 14 astronaut, back in a moment.
This is CBC.
Now back to Richard C. Hoagland near New York and Dr. Edgar Mitchell in Florida.
Gentlemen, you're back on the air.
Okay.
Go ahead, Dick.
While you were in the middle of responding to what I was laying out as the model that we can explain what we think we're seeing in these pictures, and I usually think about should this not be in every picture, and we have We have dozens and dozens of pictures from Apollo 14 that we've been able to compare now against the current versions at NSSDC, which is the National Space Science Data Center outside Washington.
And we were in Houston the other day at the Lunar Pointer Institute, and we have begun to look at versions of the images in that database.
And I can say that some of the same things that we are seeing in Ken Johnston's 30-year-old frames We are seeing on the modern version of the same frame, particularly 9301, and when I put out numbers, these are actual NASA official frame numbers in the archive.
Not the NASA headquarters numbers, but the Johnston numbers out of the Johnston Space Center.
Yeah, I can't relate to those.
I don't have all of those numbers.
Okay, well, you'll be sure to answer this question.
Which types of photos are you comparing with?
Okay, these are the color prints that were made from the reversal film that all of you took to the moon during all the missions.
All the color film was a transparency reversal film.
It was equivalent to Ektachrome X ASA 64.
And the original transparencies, when the film was brought home and developed in Houston in the lab there by Underwood and his guys, this was then a slide, a 70mm slide in essence.
And then from those slides, inter-negatives were produced.
From the inter-negatives, prints were made.
So we're down third generation now.
Johnston's prints are directly from those internegatives, so they're third generation, pristine, held in a vault for 30 years.
The NSSDC prints are excellent generation.
Unknown numbers of intermediate masters have been pulled from the archived originals in Houston, and so there has been grain buildup.
But what's really remarkable, Ed, is that the same general features On this one photo we've had time to look at and compare, 9301, are there on both sets of prints separated by 30 years.
And on the second set of prints that we got from Bobby Tice at NSSDC on my way down about a month ago to a meeting with Sarah McClendon, he literally sat in the parking lot to hand me these photos.
And when we got back here a week later, we compared them, you know, from the originals that Johnson had given me, And from the copy that Tice had given me that's 30 years younger and the same general features above the horizon north of you putting up the TV camera are present on both sets of images.
Well that is reaffirming to me that we're looking at physics and not something that we're doing in the computer or something that crept in in the lab in one batch.
It's kind of checking that you want to make sure you're looking at science.
I can't agree with that.
I agree that it is the physics of something.
I'm not quite sure it's the physics of the moon.
What would be far more telling, if we're looking at a physical object, that virtually every photograph taken with every camera in a particular direction of that object would show it.
Perhaps it would be in the frame 30 years later or a different generation.
But regardless of which camera or which film, black and white, color, if it was of the same object than a physical object, then it should show up in that picture.
And that's a more important question to me than whether a different generation 30 years later.
Okay, well let me stop you there.
We are in the process of going through these photos.
And what I did, because of the very limited resources and manpower we have, is I did spot checking.
I randomly took sets of the pictures that Johnston had given us and started looking at them.
We must go systematically and do exactly as you're saying.
Look at every single frame.
And there's lots of frames there.
You know, that's where we're really data rich.
And we're in the process of putting a lab facility together, which will be ready by the summer, where we will have the analog photographic laboratory facilities and the digital imaging facilities to do precisely that, and most important, the key manpower.
Ultimately, by the end of the summer, we will have been able to do exactly what you're saying.
I am heartened at the moment that the spot checking of some of these frames, looking in the same direction, Okay, let me ask another question here.
What is the presumed density of such a structure?
And I'm holding in my mind here the geodesic dome structure, the Bucky-Fullard dome structure, as kind of a basic model we're talking about.
What is its density?
You mean the physical density as opposed to the optical density?
They're related to each other.
Okay.
Go ahead.
If I have thin glass panels, let's say, you know, for a sake of a model, I have, you know, glass buttressing, and I'm just going to throw some numbers out here.
Every thousand feet, something comes down to the surface, and then there's a thousand foot gap before the next something comes down.
And I look horizontally through this new stuff, and it is very transparent because it's new, Alright, it hasn't been scratched, there's no holes in it, there's no meteor strikes, you don't get the Colt 45, you know, raying because of holes going through, the stuff like that.
Um, you'd have to look through an awful lot of this to be able to see it, if it was new.
If it's old, and it's got lots of holes in it, it's ratty stuff, then the density goes down, and the optical depth goes up with increasing distance, so it, you know, again, The actual physical density per cubic mile of this stuff could be pretty low and yet you'd eventually be able to see it if you look through enough of it horizontally.
I don't have a good set of numbers yet for the actual physical density.
Okay.
But I know it's got to be low and I'm working to get the right people to help us put that together and a starting point was made With FairTech and his architectural analysis, but we are a long way from coming up with a definitive number.
I know exactly where you're going with this, which is how did you guys ever get down and get back up without killing yourselves?
If there is something sufficient to cause what we're seeing in the images, and that's the question on my mind.
How did six missions successfully get down to the moon and get back up without killing somebody?
By running into this stuff.
Yeah, and it's even more profound than you're suggesting here.
That part's true, but that just scratches the surface.
Now, let's go ahead and explore this.
Is it a wall of a structure, like a wall of a building?
Is it a far more dense structure, like a very thick wall of a fortress, but miles thick?
Let's just develop this idea here.
Well, in terms of what we're seeing in the pictures, and our database, you know, since we've not really had a chance to talk about this, this gives me an opportunity to at least tell you where we're coming from.
We've now looked at unmanned data from Lunar Orbiter, unmanned data from Surveyor, particularly Surveyor 6.
The after sunset photographs taken from the surface of Sinus Medi, looking west from Surveyor 6, were really striking.
And we have six sets of images taken up to an hour, hour and a half after sunset, looking west with the sun well below the horizon, where this stuff can be seen on the Surveyor 6 data in forward scattering.
From the coronal light, you can see the scattering and geometry of this stuff extending up, and I will send you those if you're interested.
We then go through the lunar orbiter material.
We see evidence of this on lunar orbiter pictures, and the most The most complete and high-res data, of course, is the Apollo data because the black-and-white stuff was shot on aerial reconnaissance film, very high-resolution film, and physically returned to Earth.
The surface stuff was shot on black-and-white and color and physically returned.
So we have a really broad cross-section of data to integrate and to try to converge a model for this stuff and how dense it is and how it interacts with the surface in selected regions.
And that's how I tell you that it's got to be low density, very ancient, very ratty, very degraded.
And the best chance of seeing it is through the long path length horizontally as the ray goes from the
surface out into space.
I do not have a number yet on exactly physically how close the closest section of this stuff could have been to
Antares or to some of the other missions.
But it's miles away.
It's not feet or hundreds of feet.
It's miles away, which is why there's this window, given that you guys were wearing these gold helmets which
filter out ultraviolet light, this really important window that we might have sent.
The funny thing to me is that we might have sent six sets of
men there, and they didn't even notice what was there.
And you're starting to really press the credibility issue now, Richard.
Well, the alternative is that we're looking.
You're making drawing conclusions that are not necessarily warranted.
Let's just stick with data.
Let's just stick with what we have without drawing conclusions.
At the moment, what you're suggesting is a physical structure of some sort that looks very transparent.
And even old and ratty, that's kind of an assumption.
How do we know it's old and ratty?
That's been quite tricky.
At least it's dense, or not too dense.
It transmits light.
Apparently, you're trying to say that if we run into it with a spacecraft or with our bodies, we don't notice it, but light comes through it.
No, I didn't say that.
No, what I said was that it has to be a very low density so that the odds against running into it were very low.
Otherwise you guys wouldn't have survived That was you but you cannot sit down like I'm a regular
about molecular density of very low molecular density which means that
It's more gas like gaseous than it is filled firms No, no, no.
You're not listening to what I'm saying.
I'm saying that it's physical hard glass.
But that if you did a number density so many grams per cubic mile, there's so little of it left that you have to look through a long path length to see it.
And the odds of physically contacting it because there's so little left is very small.
Particularly if you have any pre-knowledge of where the stuff is and how to come down through the holes.
Are you assuming that we have that pre-knowledge?
What you're describing is far more commensurate or close to the density of molecular gas than it is to a physical, hard structure.
You're getting down to densities here that have to be very, very thin.
Alright, I will agree with you in principle, although I would argue that if I come back to New York City in 10,000 years, now we're living right next to it tonight, and it's pretty solid, steel, concrete, glass, whatever, and it's been eroded by all the forces of the earth, you know, wind, oxygen, oxidation, stuff like that.
You can have some pretty solid structures now that if you come back in 10,000 years will be almost non-existent just because of physical forces.
If we're looking on the moon, the only erosive force on the moon that we understand is micrometeorite sandblasting.
If you have a structure and it's made of glass and you erode it from sandblasting over literally millions of years or even longer, And it's in a total vacuum where there isn't a trace of air, and the only operative force is the hypervelocity shrapnel from each impact.
What does the remaining structure look like, and how thin can it get, and still maintain a configuration?
I'm almost thinking of something that has the consistency of cigarette ash, where if you touch it, it will fall down.
If you physically get close enough to touch some of the stuff, but that in the absence of physically touching it, It would stand there as an optical ghost of what it used to be and would interact with light like we're seeing on these images.
It's a stunning picture of something so fragile that it cannot survive much shaking.
And if we bumped it at all with our bodies or a spacecraft or anything else over the years, it will not collapse.
Or portions of it or whatever, yeah.
Okay, let's paint a picture.
Let me paint a picture here for a couple of minutes with our audience.
Let's pin down exactly what we're talking about.
If you look up at the full moon, right in the center, both vertically and horizontally at the center, and just to the left and down, about 15 degrees down, about 3 degrees, you get the area that we're talking about.
To the center of the moon, the Apollo 14 landing was the Fra Mauro area.
South of the Bright Ray Crater, Copernicus.
Yeah.
Just a bit south of Copernicus.
And a little bit to the east of Copernicus.
The Apollo 12 mission was almost directly south of Copernicus.
We're just a little bit east of that.
We're a couple hundred miles apart.
Or maybe a little more.
The immediate location of Apollo 14.
I like to picture this.
Picture a strip.
About a mile or a mile and a half running east to west, slightly tilted northeast to southwest, about a mile and a half long and maybe a hundred yards wide.
Now that little rectangular strip represents the area of investigation of the Apollo 14 The area of the physical investigation.
Let me stop you there.
If I take a picture horizontally looking north or west or east, that ray can go for tens or even a hundred miles before it encounters space.
And what we're looking at may be so thin in terms of density That the stuff we're seeing Ed could be tens of miles away from you and you had no hope of ever physically walking up to it and putting your glove on it.
That's consistent with these surface pictures which is why I was so excited when Johnston gave them to us and we found what appears to be on them.
Okay.
Fine.
Let me continue my description Ed.
If we look to the east end of our little rectangular strap The east of it goes to the edge of Cone Crater, which is a crater about 500 to 600 feet above the surface that we climbed up to investigate.
The west end of it is a little past where the Lunar Module landed, about 150 yards beyond where the Lunar Module entrance is sitting on the surface.
And that's where ALSEP Station, our scientific station and telemetry station, was set up.
So it's that region that we physically traversed and did a lot of work.
Now Richard is relying rather heavily on the pan that we took in the vicinity of the lunar module.
We took actually a pan about every 15 minutes or less.
So there are dozens of pans.
Right.
We have the green books.
We have the green books, these are the USGS, the things were put out and we know all the
pens and we ordered the others.
We have two or three of those pens right now but we don't have all of them and we want
all of them and want to do the same thing.
Your whole case changes virtually on every photograph looking in the directions you're
talking about showing exactly the same thing.
Exactly, that's where the correlating data should occur if we're looking at real stuff.
If you're looking at real stuff.
Now, if indeed you're looking at real stuff, it should show up in every photograph and maybe it will, maybe it won't.
Let me stop you there.
The two pieces of data I can absolutely attest to tonight, the single frame photo, AS14-669301, which you have, all right?
That's the single Hasselblad showing you putting up the camera underneath some of this stuff looking north.
And then the mosaic we have that Shepard took, which has another frame of you taken a few seconds later, which are two separate pictures.
We see an optical parallax.
We see a physical movement of this stuff west of you on the horizon between the two pictures.
Shepard stepped back.
He took that picture right at the base of the ladder.
Then he stepped back a few feet and began this mosaic.
The stuff on the horizon physically moves relative to you between these two pictures.
All right, gentlemen.
Indicating it's miles and miles and miles beyond you to the north.
Richard, and Doctor, hold on.
We've got a break here.
We're at the top of the hour, so we'll pick it up at that point when we come back.
We will also talk about what can and cannot be said by those people who went to The Moon.
We'll get into that time.
Very interesting.
Upcoming.
Richard C. Hoagland, Dr. Mitchell, back in a few.
These two gentlemen and gentlemen it's all yours I heard this is it.
Might I say to our listeners, my dedication, could you keep it short?
Well, let's see, where were we?
Richard was trying to make his case here that what we're observing, he theorizes, is a structure of some sort.
You at the most.
At the most.
Yes, alright.
Alright, well let's see, where were we?
Well, we were, Richard was trying to make his case here that what we're observing he
theorizes is a structure of some sort and the best case out here being made right now
is that there may be a physical anomaly of some sort that's observable in the photographs
that we don't experience with our bodies or with our spacecraft.
Let me continue to make that case just a moment and set the picture here.
Remember that with the lunar module, before we descended to the lunar surface, we came down into an orbit that's about 10 miles above the lunar surface, which is a little over 50,000 feet.
So we were whizzing around the lunar surface at around 57,000 feet, let's call it 60,000 feet above the lunar surface in the equatorial belt for quite a few orbits.
And both spacecraft were there for a while, but generally the command module was up in a higher orbit and only deposited the lunar module in the 10-mile orbit before making its descent.
Now, if the theory that Hogan and others are putting forth is correct, these structures on the Moon, we had to penetrate them numerous times, over and over again, before descending to the lunar surface, and as we came back from the lunar surface, we had to penetrate this structure, whatever it is.
Also, this is turning to me to be very, very difficult to to believe in or to understand
Because there's just no evidence that we Contacted any physical structure in this way
The fact that there may be some physical phenomenon going on that is observable in the photograph
that's causing us these photographs to appear as they are and
Perhaps even some diffusion effects or some reflective effects on light
That would not be too surprising that we might have be discovering a physical effect of some sort we that we didn't
understand before To believe that that physical effect might be caused by a physical structure like a wall or a glass-type wall or glass girders, beams, anything like that, that stretches credibility beyond what I'm willing to accept at all without some more evidence.
Richard does need to look at every single photograph or representatives of all the photographs in different locations, different directions, black and white color from every film, every magazine to see if these effects are indeed there.
If they're there, there is a physical effect going on.
It may still be just in the emulsion.
It may be in the anomalies in the various camera systems.
All that could be isolated.
That's what good science is all about.
But I think we're stretching the point enormously to suggest that there are physical structures on the moon, suspended above the moon, covering the moon like a geodesic dome, since that's the model we're using, that are not observed through the physical interaction of our spacecraft, our bodies, and so forth, but are observable due to photographic anomalies.
May I say something?
There are a couple of assumptions in your description, Ed, that were not in my description.
One is the altitude.
We don't know for sure what the altitude of this proposed dome structure is.
The parasitian altitude or the paralune of the command lunar module combination when
they brought you down to that orbit was about 50,000 feet, you're right.
So that's 10 miles roughly.
So let's presume that the top parts of this are lower than that.
That's consistent with vertex analysis and some other geometry.
So you need not have encountered this on that low orbit prior to the actual descent or on
any other mission.
When you say no physical effects, there are a wide variety of other observations from
the Apollo missions which are now consistent with this model, the most intriguing of which
being the seismic data.
Beginning on Apollo 11 and really getting in stride on Apollo 12, the ALSEP seismometers, the lunar science packages that were left behind on the moon powered by These radioisotope thermoelectric generators that lasted for years until NASA arbitrarily turned them all off back in 1978.
They sent miles and miles and miles of data, and I had long discussions prior to the missions as Science Advisor to Cronkite and to CBS with Gary Latham, who was the PI out of Columbia, regarding the seismic data he expected from these seismometers at the various landing sites across the surface of the Moon.
And the major anomaly that was detected immediately on 11 and discounted because it was so bizarre,
and then encountered again on the Apollo 12 mission with that seismometer and continued
through the rest of the missions which carried seismometers, which you left, was this remarkable
ringing effect where the moon, when it was struck by either meteors or meteorites or
spent rocket stages, the S-IVB from the launch was used as a kind of an impactor on many
missions.
The impact would generate ringing like a bell for hours and hours in the lunar seismic data.
I have literally stacks of papers from the lunar science conferences.
Okay, but go ahead and tie that in to why that is consistent with the structure.
Because if we're looking at a glass trestle-like material, if we're looking at glass structure, which has a very low Q, you know, it resonates and transmits sound very efficiently, then that would be consistent with what we're seeing in the seismic data.
The other thing that's interesting is the... You're pushing that too far, Richard.
Let's let our audience know that most any solid structure is going to ring to a certain extent.
What it means is that the sound is not being attenuated or the wave is not being attenuated.
It is continuing to reverberate through the structure itself.
So any structure, it doesn't have to be consistent with your dome above the surface theory.
Any structure within the moon itself.
Although it is what you say, it doesn't have to be explained by it, but it is consistent
with it.
And the thing that makes the lunar data so anomalous is that...
Yeah, but wait a minute, wait a minute.
You're misleading here.
Let's keep our data separate.
The ringing is consistent with many, many other properties of the moon also, not just
a structure above the surface.
Well, it's consistent with proposed models, but the models were created to explain the data.
It's like, you know, it's like... Yes, but let's not push our data too far, which is what I accuse you of doing here.
On the Earth, when you have seismic impacts, I had lots of discussions with Latham on this, you have a very short time before the Earth's crust attenuates the wave and the ringing goes away.
The major anomaly on the Moon is the Moon is struck by some kind of impacting object, meteor, rocket stage, whatever.
The Lunar Module Ascent Stages were used to probe this when they were de-orbited from Houston as you guys were coming home.
And what was instantly apparent is that the Moon seismically is radically different than the Earth and rings Regardless of what hits it for hours and hours and hours.
Okay, and the moon also has no liquid on it to speak of.
It's a very, very tiny core.
It's virtually a solid substance.
Yep, and the conventional explanation was that you have this regolith, this mass of debris going down hundreds of meters, if not maybe a kilometer.
Which, uh, without water, in a vacuum, did not provide the attenuation that you get on Earth, and so the seismic waves, the sound waves, the ringing, would persist.
Okay.
I can show you other geology papers, including one from up here at Columbia, from a colleague of Glason's, who basically said in his paper, and I've got the papers, that one other explanation is a high-quality ceramic.
Now that's one whisker away from saying glass.
And unfortunately, he's no longer with us.
He died back in the 60s.
That is not even germane.
The point is, any sort of more dense substance on the moon is more likely to cause a ringing.
You are talking about structure above the moon, which, yes, it may be consistent.
But that isn't the issue.
That's misleading.
There are other details.
In the seismic data, there were patterns observed to this ringing.
The seismometers had an X, Y, and Z axis sensor.
It could detect motion up and down, left and right, and back and forth.
In terms of looking at the alignment of these sensors from mission to mission to mission, what Latham and his colleagues in a series of papers noted was there appeared to be an alignment to the ringing consistent with a geometry.
And that geometry is reflected and is consistent with what we're seeing in the photographs, particularly the orbital photographs that we looked at and that we presented in Washington at the press conference.
Now, this is all preliminary.
I'm not saying this is conclusive.
I'm saying that you're looking for other evidence.
You're really misleading when you're pushing it in this direction.
Consistency is one thing, but claiming Let me raise a third point.
Back in the 1960s, beginning in 1966, when the Lunar Orbiters were put into orbit, Mueller and who was the other guy at JPL, the Mascon guy, do you remember him?
but i'm talking about because you it what we're part of the country report
recovery but i'm really third point right back in the nineteen sixties beginning in sixty six when
the lunar orbiters are put into orbit
uh...
miller and who would be a good idea p l the other other uh...
the mascot you remember him
i remember him okay there were two there were two scientists
who were looking at the tracking data from the unmanned lunar orbiter
before apollo and they noted that there were these funny residuals in the
top of tracking data meaning the spacecraft was
speeding up and slowing down wobbling and wobbling and and and funny fashion
And the consensus was that there were mass concentrations, mass cons.
Under the Maria that were affecting the gravity field and thereby affecting the motion of the spacecraft orbiting close to the moon.
What's really interesting, Ed, is that if we replace the Maston model with a shattered lunar dome model over the Maria, we get the same effect.
And what's really striking, and I'm going to bring in another mission, Apollo 10, and I'm going to send you the video, all right?
Which we showed to a group of engineers in Houston just a few days ago and blew their minds.
We have a piece of film shot by Apollo 10 of Earthrise over Mare Smithe, which is on the far edge of the moon.
Alright, this is actual 16mm DAC motion picture film showing Earthrise tangentially seen from the lunar module as it was doing that Precursor test for Apollo 11.
Looking at the Earth over Mare Smythe and as it rises, the Earth is so incredibly distorted that the only conclusion is there's some optical medium extending above Mare Smythe like the remains of a shattered dome.
And I will send you this, and I want you to go through it frame by frame by frame, because what happens with the DAC cameras is they would turn them off.
You would turn them off in the windows, and the film would run down through inertia for several more frames.
In effect, increasing the exposure length.
At the end of the rundown, when the film is going through the gate very slowly, and the effective exposure is ten times longer than for the normal framing rate, You can actually physically see the remains of the dome structure on these frames.
And this has been shown now to a number of engineers on Apollo, a number of people in Houston, people like Johnson and others, and universally everyone is dumbfounded by what is visible on this motion picture film, and we're now looking for more motion picture films shot on other missions of similar Earthrise anomalies.
Richard, I hear what you're saying.
I will agree that there may be anomalies that we need to look at, but you're pushing it when you're really talking about dome structures on the moon.
There must be other explanations of it.
I'm sure there are other explanations of the phenomena that you're looking at, because there are just too many things that legislate.
You're stuck on this theory, and it's just not going to go to water.
Well, there are anomalies.
I'm sure that you can find anomalies.
Anomaly is a nice catch-all phrase.
If we're not looking at physical structure, and we're not looking at optical effects in the film, All right, and we've got four years of people... I think that's what you're looking at is optical illusion.
Well, but wait a minute.
We've had four years of a lot of people, a lot of photographic experts that have looked at this film.
We had eight scientists standing with us on the day at the National Press Club in Washington, people who don't want to look silly and get egg on their face, who did not commit to go in public and talk about this without a lot of soul-searching and a lot of looking at this data.
You mean we're all mistaking this?
You're the only one that can be right about this, and we all... No, no, not saying that at all.
I'm not saying that at all, but I am saying that you're pushing your data much, much too hard.
That there's got to be other explanations.
No way, but why does there have to be?
How did these structures get here?
What are we talking about?
Let's talk about origin.
Well, that's speculation.
I don't know.
What in the world are you doing that's speculation?
No, there's a radical difference between looking at effects on film and optical effects consistent with known physics.
I'm trying to explain what we're seeing in the images and speculating who did it and where they came from.
That is real speculation.
I have no idea.
But wait a minute.
What type of... I think the structure here is our problem.
I don't have any problem at all with a molecular effect, but when you're talking an unnatural structure, then you're talking something that is not occurring by natural physics.
Okay, let me give you some more data.
Then you need to address, if it's an unnatural structure, how did it get there?
And that is not speculation.
It's part of your theory.
Okay, if it's an unnatural structure, and we can agree, and you and I obviously are not going to agree tonight that it's unnatural, but let's assume at some point we get to where we agree.
If we agree that it's unnatural, then of course the next question is, who built it?
That's right.
Alright, how did it get there?
Well, I mean... Aren't you claiming it's unnatural?
Based on what we looked at, four years of data from man-to-man missions, I would be hard-pressed to explain this as anything now but an unnatural set of facts.
Okay, then you've jumped right into it.
Don't gloss it over.
If you're having to claim it's unnatural, that opens up an entirely different ballgame of explanation.
I would say it has to be natural.
Use Occam's Razor.
You must approach it with a more simple explanation if possible.
If that doesn't work, go to your unnatural.
Why is unnatural versus natural a simpler explanation?
In your own book, and I'm sitting here by the way fascinated by your book and I heartily
recommend it, The Way of the Explorer with Dwight Williams.
Let's mention your other author, okay?
You make the case for the phenomena of ESP and telepathy and a whole series of avant-garde
experiences.
Most people are unnatural.
Richard, you're headed off into a good direction, but I don't want you to unwind it with a break.
We're at a break, so gentlemen, relax, get a cup of coffee, whatever, we'll be right back to you.
Richard C. Hoagland and Dr. Edgar Mitchell, the Apollo 14 astronauts, are my guests.
I'll be back.
Welcome to our debate. Gentlemen, can either one or both of you explain any way that these structures, as you have
described, Richard, could possibly be a natural phenomenon that is occurring?
They would have to be unnatural by definition, wouldn't they?
Let me jump on that.
Sure.
I think I could bring us closer to agreement here and put it on a different level.
We may not be as far apart as Richard perceives we are at the moment, so let me give you a good lead here just before we go.
In my own book, I take on the establishment as well, and it's a slightly different approach and that's what I want to make a comparison with right now to see if we can bring us closer to agreement.
I suggest that the common phenomenon that all of humanity has experienced in one way or another, our inner experience, and we have all these words, ESP, psychokinesis, etc., etc., that apply to this.
Our scientific community for a long time, or at least in the last century, has said this is not a valid phenomenon.
It isn't real.
It's imagination.
On the other hand, all of our cultural traditions say, oh yes, it's very real, but we attach a supernatural or unnatural explanation to it.
A divine explanation, a satanic explanation, and so forth.
I deny that those are appropriate ways to approach it.
It is real.
And it's also natural and so I spend a lot of my time and a book exploring the idea that these are very natural phenomena and that they're explanations within physics.
It turns out that the physics of the last couple of decades centered around non-locality does offer some very, very nice explanations for how all of this can come together in a natural model of how the universe functions.
Now, I would like to take this same comparison to what we're talking about here on the moon.
There may indeed be anomalous behavior that we're experiencing and observing here in the photographs taken on the moon.
I don't know that there's anomalous behavior, but Richard is claiming that there is, and that he's observing it from looking at these photographs.
Well, Richard and colleagues... And colleagues, okay.
Uh, there is certain evidence that simply doesn't fit with our model of how the moon was put together.
What's coming out of this is... I'm glad to hear you say that, Ed.
There is an unnatural explanation by that.
What we mean is it is not just a part of the physics we understand.
I want to make my position very clear.
I agree with Richard and many other folks that we are not the sole creative intelligences
in this universe that earth is not the sole repository of life nor creative activity.
My position is that it is throughout the universe.
We must look at the universe in the way that allows intelligence and life like we experience
it to have arisen everywhere not just here on earth.
That requires a very marked change in the way we understand the physics, the chemistry,
the whole structure of the way the universe is put together.
And that's what I'm suggesting here in the way we look at this problem.
That what Richard and colleagues have suggested seems to require an unnatural explanation for what they are observing.
a structure and when you say structure and a natural then you have to ask the question
but created by whom, when, from where, how did it get there and so forth.
That is a very difficult set of questions to answer. It's much easier I think and much more
credible to approach the problem to say we have an anomalous phenomenon here and maybe there's
There's something about the physics of the situation that we don't quite understand.
Now that's the approach I took in my book with regard, in the last 25 years, with regard to the phenomenon I have been looking at, and others have been looking at.
And I think we have discovered, in the mechanism of non-locality, which interpreted other ways, says that the universe is interconnected, and that part of Newtonian classical physics was not correct, That you can get explanations through quantum physics and nonlocality that satisfy the situation.
I'm suggesting the same thing here.
That I would much prefer to look at this as anomalous phenomenon.
See if we can find something in the physics that even though it may be a bizarre physics, something in the physics that satisfies the problem without at the moment having to go to Extraterrestrials or some other unnatural explanation has had it before, have increased this effect because that is a far more difficult request and far more difficult explanation than just looking at bizarre physics.
Just like on your Sedona, on the moon, I mean on Mars, the McDaniels, the crater McDaniels Report, suggests one of two things.
It's either bizarre geology that we don't understand or perhaps it's extraterrestrial
or rather it's unnatural structure.
I'm suggesting the same thing here that there may be an unnatural physics involved and I
find that a much more easily addressed subject than an unnatural resolution to the problem.
So go ahead Richard.
Art?
Yes, yes, yes.
I think we're making a little history tonight.
Well, maybe.
Because Ed and I are much closer than I would have imagined.
I'm delighted to hear this commonality because if you start with the premise that there's something interesting to explore, And men of integrity and women of integrity pursue that path.
Ultimately, you will find out what anomaly you're dealing with.
Absolutely.
And that's what I want to do.
I want to find out.
All right.
And what I would like is Ed's commitment on the air tonight to help us, and there's a lot of us out here, geologists, chemists, optical physicists, a wide range of experts to which his expertise would be invaluable if he would offer to be a Kind of a grounding.
Sounds ironic for an astronaut to be a grounding for us to bounce ideas and data off.
As we pursue the search for what it is that's showing up in this wide variety of pictures, I think we have made some significant progress tonight.
Well, Richard, I never loathe to investigate anomalous phenomena.
Sometimes I don't have enough time to investigate all the ones I want to look at.
And if you have indeed really turned up a very strange and bizarre set of events that are not explainable, sure, I'm intrigued.
I'm always intrigued by that.
What I am turned off by is jumping to conclusions when there's a more obvious way to go.
All right.
Gentlemen, I want to jump in and ask a question.
Richard, in the facts that you sent to me earlier today, You said Dr. Mitchell, on his previous appearance, emphatically claimed that he was not precluded by NASA from discussing anything that he either saw or experienced during his Apollo 14 flight.
You, in fact, did say that, Dr. Mitchell.
Correct?
That's correct.
All right.
Richard says the NASA Space Act itself, in light of Brookings' strong recommendation, says otherwise.
That you were, in fact, barred from discussing many things that you would have seen and done.
Is that correct, Richard?
Well, let's not be unclear on this.
I have in my hands a copy of Public Law 85-568 from the 85th Congress, H.R.
12575, published July 29, 1958, called an Act, which is the enabling legislation which created the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
This is the Document which basically brought into being the agency which employed Ed Mitchell to go to the moon back in 1971.
And there are several interesting sections to this.
This entire document is up on the Enterprise Mission website, which can be reached through the Arcto website on the net.
On page four, there is a section titled, Functions of the Administration, meaning NASA.
And it says that Section 203 The administration, in order to carry out the purpose of this act, shall 1.
Plan, direct, and conduct aeronautical and space activities.
2.
Arrange participation by the scientific community, etc.
3.
Provide for the widest practicable and appropriate dissemination of information concerning its activities and the result thereof.
Now that's the part that we always quote because it's the part that the American people have as their guarantee that everything NASA found It got to see.
All right?
Unfortunately, as we look through the act, we found there are other interesting sections that are not as generally well-known.
For instance, there's a section on page 8.
Well, let me start with page 7.
This is section 206, subsection A, the administration, meaning NASA.
...shall submit to the President for transmittal to the Congress, semi-annually, and at other times as deemed desirable, reports of its activities and accomplishments.
It then says, Section D, no information which has been classified for reasons of national security shall be included in any report made under this section unless such information has been declassified by Or pursuant to authorization given by the President.
So there's a caveat there.
Let me jump in, Richard, because we're spending a lot of time on details here.
Let me just cut across that.
There are some valid areas of technical development that I'm sure military and security people, which they came out of the NASA program by and large, those are very, very limited, but I can Think of some, for example, the development of computer technologies was certainly not released to all nations of the world and it was classified in some way.
But we're talking about discovery here.
What is really the issue of going to the moon and the data that we recovered, scientific data in this sense, was not classified.
We were not under any restriction.
Yes, there was a time delay between the live voice circuit and what went out on the air.
I think most of that was designed to keep four letter words because sometimes we spoke a little roughly.
Four letter words from getting out without censorship.
But the content of what we were reporting, the content of what we were doing was not
in any way classified.
We were not briefed on anything concerning classification.
It was not even discussed about extraterrestrial.
Lord, we would have loved to have been able to discuss something about that, or have had
something to discuss.
It simply wasn't there.
All information having to do with national security, military operations, the sophistication
of our equipment, yes, it might have been classified stuff, but by and large it was
very little.
Let me make another couple of points here from the act.
Further down on this page 8, relating to security, section 304, and this again is on the website for those who want to read it.
The Administrator shall establish such security requirements, restrictions, and safeguards as he deems necessary.
Notice the assumption that it's always going to be a he.
1958, alright?
As he deems necessary in the interest of the national security.
Ed, we have a document, we have a study from Brookings that was commissioned in 59 and was delivered to the Congress in 61, which we call the Brookings Report, which is a several hundred page document with a section related specifically to the implications of NASA's confirmation of extraterrestrial intelligence, either by means of radio Or artifacts, and they claim that you might find them, NASA might find them, someday from the perspective of 59, on the Moon, Mars, or Venus.
There then is another section of Brookings related to the recommendation that consideration be given to withholding such a discovery from the American people for reason of fear of social dislocation or social disturbance.
Well, that may be true, Richard.
I don't have any problem with the fact that it's written in a record.
What I'm saying is that the Act itself provides, in law, the mechanism for the administrator, for whom you work, for whom you sign documents, alright, to restrict dissemination of this information if it ever came to pass.
Now, the problem I'm having is that, you know, we're all lawful individuals.
We all presumably operate under the law.
If this, in fact, was a reality, then sitting on the radio this morning, you could not, in conscience with what you had signed, admit to the presence of remarkable anomalies there, in consonance with the Administrator's classification.
You're taking it way out of context.
Let's say that at the time that was done it was undoubtedly considered a prudent policy
to write such a thing into effect.
In practice what has happened however is that I know of no administrator since that time
who have really considered as far as operating as crews and people on the job doing it had
utterly no effect on us whatsoever.
I have signed nothing that suggests that I am aware of that or that I am required to
be circumspect in what I say.
It simply doesn't exist.
That is a bit of theoretical structure in the last 40 years that has virtually no practical bearing on what we're talking about.
I am quoting from the law, the enabling legislation.
That's enabling?
On page 11, in section I, it says, the administration, meaning nothing, Shall be considered a defense agency of the United States.
Now, we always operated on the assumption, when I was with CBS, I absolutely would have sworn on a stack of Bibles and Korans that NASA was the civilian agency for space exploration and the government of the United States.
Literally, a few days ago, when I read this carefully, I was stunned to see in the language The actual act says that NASA shall be considered a defense agency of the United States.
Now what that implies... That's an interesting bit of, I'll have to admit, that's an interesting bit of language.
Isn't it?
Now what that implies is that in confidence with Brookings, if, not you guys, let's take the astronauts out of the equation for a minute because, as I said at the top of the show, there are absolutely physical I really firmly believe that.
So let's take you out of the equation.
If there were people in NASA who knew there were interesting things there, and they were specifically looking for further information, and the landing sites were chosen so they could get it, maybe without your knowledge, from the films, from the seismic data, whatever, The Administrator, with this language, can classify all of that, and Golden, to this day, does not have to tell us unless Bill Clinton says, Dan, we want to finally now go public.
In principle, I think you may be right, with that language that you've just read.
It's on the web.
However, in practice, that simply is not the way it happened.
That isn't the way sites were selected.
That isn't the way missions were chosen.
That sort of knowledge that you're talking about might have existed, simply didn't exist.
How would it have existed in the first place?
Simply didn't exist.
It didn't operate.
So what we're getting awfully close to in this discussion is some more of the great conspiracy theories, which we hear a lot of floating around the country at this point, which simply don't hold water.
They should be looked at.
I don't want to dismiss them until they're out of hand.
Yes, there are people within government who might hold that point of view.
But very frankly, in this particular area, in going to the moon, during the Apollo program, during the entire NASA program, that sort of conspiracy and that sort of cover-up simply did not have those rules.
We didn't, however.
Gentlemen, I've got to break in.
We've got one more hour.
If you can both give us one more hour.
Oh, why not, Art?
We've ruined the night already, Art.
We've been fighting the day already.
It is dawn here, I think, for both of us.
Might as well stick with it.
Yes, all right.
Very good.
Gentlemen, stand by.
Richard C. Hoagland of the Enterprise mission.
Apollo 14 astronaut, Dr. Edgar Mitchell, back in a moment.
We'll tell you how to get their materials.
Get a pencil.
When we come back, we'll go through all that.
I'm Art Bell.
all day kitchen with the capital picture here
the uh... the uh... strobe photography but and on the cover of cornet magazine there used to be
this frozen image of a droplet of milk exactly uh... sprayed up in a kind of a semi-hemispherical
uh...
In inverse dome structure, I think that's what the caller is, or the faxer.
Exactly.
In other words, if you slam a rock into the water, a wall comes up from that, correct?
Okay, now let me dispose of that.
It's a good idea, but no cigar.
Because in order for that to freeze and to remain visible, the physics of the impact would have to be Totally different from the laboratory data and whatever, and Ed and I are in total agreement that really cannot explain what we're seeing.
All right.
Well, it was a good try.
The audience is thinking.
That's what we want.
And as long as we're looking at natural phenomenon and questioning them, we're on the right track.
All right.
Let me stop you there, Ed, because you're doing this Descartes thing on me, which I find fascinating.
To me, one of the most interesting things of the NBC program the other night was when you stood up in front of an audience, I think it was in Cambridge, and you said there's this false dichotomy of the world, natural and unnatural, or natural and paranormal.
You said it's all normal.
If it's experience, it's all there and we've got to figure it out.
For you to separate natural and unnatural, but human activities, intelligent activities, frame this in a larger sense, that intellectual,
intelligent activity in the universe is unnatural is I guess what I'm having a slight problem with because if
what we're looking at on the moon if what we're looking at on the moon is artificial then to
me it's as natural as if we're looking at geophysics. I will agree. It may be more improbable. It may
be more improbable given what we currently think of as what's going on in our own backyard but it ain't
unnatural. No I agree with that. Okay.
We're pushing words here but what I'm talking about is vestiges If we're implying vestiges of a civilization and intelligent beings constructing something, I think we've got a problem with that.
Well, no way.
All right, let's pursue that.
Well, if we do... Richard, hold on.
If we have a problem with that, then we should have a problem with Roswell and with other strong hints of extraterrestrials.
Well, I think we do.
I think we do.
I don't think that all of these are foregone conclusions.
I have said over and over and over again, in the public domain, we don't have smoking gun evidence that Roswell or any other visitation is absolutely real.
We haven't put all of that to bed yet.
I think the probability, the statistics are getting very, very high, in my opinion.
That yes, these are real physical events, and they have been dramatically covered up.
Please, let me say something.
This is interesting.
Because for Roswell, and I've studied the Roswell case, obviously not as much as the experts, people like Stan Friedman and the others, but I've certainly looked into it, because it's quintessential, you know, E.T.' 's land lost far from home.
Spaceship vanishes, military men are sworn to secrecy, civilians... I mean, it stands as the pinnacle experience of the so-called field.
And yet, there's not one datum of physical evidence currently existing.
And we now know that because of Stephen Schiff's work in the GAO report.
Even the traffic, even the communications traffic in and out of Roswell, which should have been preserved, bureaucracies live on paper.
mysteriously was shredded and disappeared over the years.
Whereas in the lunar example, we have good physical evidence
on lots of missions, lots of pictures, excellent database to examine with current technology,
and if all that fails, we got the moon, Ed, to go back to, and we're going back to the moon.
I truly agree.
What's your point, though?
I don't see the connection here between what you're making.
My point is this.
You have come out championing... I mean, you just said it a moment ago, that we're pushing close to the smoking gun on Roswell, where there isn't one scintilla of physical evidence that has survived.
And yet, on the lunar data, where there's all kinds of physical evidence, and we can really solve this with a relatively short fuse, You're telling me that we don't have enough to even make a plausible case for artificial structures?
No, I didn't say you don't have enough to make a plausible case.
I just don't want to lock us into that is the answer.
I will grant, I will say it's a very, very low probability event.
But I can conceive of scenarios where that might be the case.
I just don't think it's a very likely explanation.
On a low probability event, what are we talking about?
Which series of events are we talking about?
Oh, that the phenomenon you are explaining for your photographs as being intelligent made structures, sometime in the past.
I say that there's a very low probability of being the explanation for what you're looking at.
All right, let me jump in.
If Roswell is likely, and Gordon Cooper, who went on Paranormal Borderline in this last week and described an incident at Edwards Air Force Base, where a saucer came down while a military film crew was filming, extended landing gear, landed, the film crew went toward it, continuing to film this event, It lifted off the ground, retracted the gear, and shot straight up into the sky.
Now, that's what he said happened at Edwards when he was there, and the report was filed, and the film was sent to Washington, and it all disappeared.
Well, if that is so, and if Roswell is at least probable, then why not think of it as probable for there to be remains of civilizations that have been Long established, long gone perhaps.
Well, I don't disagree with the process you're using to compare these things.
The answer though comes in what is the probability number that you're using, in my opinion.
The probability number for the explanation of Richard's anomalous photographic events As being constructed by some other civilization.
I think the probability of that being the right explanation is very low.
That is my personal opinion.
I think the probability that the Roswell incident representing an extraterrestrial event is taking on the proportions of very high probability because of the accumulation of evidence over the years.
The probability of what Gordon Cooper presented as a valid piece of evidence, I can't evaluate it yet, although I was just with Gordon and a number of the astronauts over the weekend and we discussed these very things we're talking about.
Because I don't have any experience with that particular event, that's a new one on me that Gordon just talked about recently.
And so that hasn't been digested.
Here is the paradox that Art is bringing up.
Pardon?
Here is the paradox that Art is bringing up, and it's a very eloquent point, Art, and I'm impressed that you would, you know, put all this together.
The main argument against the Mars data, or the Moon data, for as long, now 13 years we've been looking at this, has been basically the Purcell claim.
You know, God's quarantine regulations, the idea that we are limited to speed of light travel.
The Earth in this solar system is four light years from the nearest star, probably hundreds of light years from the nearest inhabitable star.
Richard, I'm sorry.
Richard, I'm sorry.
I've got to break in.
We're at the bottom of the hour, so mark... We'll break this up.
Put a bookmark there, and we'll be right back.
All right.
Richard C. Hoagland.
Dr. Edgar Mitchell, Apollo 14 astronaut, back in a moment.
To get a taped copy of this program, you call 1-800-917-4278.
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