But it was all part of a gigantic hoax by NASA and President Richard M. Nixon ...
So did Johnson, who oversaw most of the work, know about the alleged hoax? You gotta hand it to people who don't look carefully at the dates.
... according to the meticulously documented study.
Dark Moon not "meticulously documented". For example, the authors did not verify the story of "Una Ronald", although it was fairly easy for me and others to do. They did not trace the origin of the Surveyor III footage. In fact, reading Dark Moon I come across at least one major undocumented assertion in every section.
Further, they categorize the index, making it almost impossible to locate their discussion of any one point.
It wouldn't be so bad if the authors weren't so evasive about answering questions.
Information provided by American rocket scientist Bill Kaysing ...
He wasn't a "scientist" of any kind. He got his degree in English literature, and it's not surprising that he has chosen to make his living writing books.
... was employed at California's Propulsion Field Laboratory in the late 1950s
Notice how they never mention Rocketdyne, so that you can't verify his employment. However I tend to believe this is simply the typically sloppy reporting of WWN. The author of the story probably had only half an hour to write it.
... and worked on the prototype for Armstrong's Eagle landing craft.
Oh no he didn't.
Rocketdyne builds rocket engines. They don't build spacecraft. Grumman (in New York, not California) was the prime contractor.
The LM's ascent engine was built by Bell. Its steering jets were built by Marquardt. Rocketdyne was contracted to build the descent engine, but that contract was eventually canceled in 1965 in favor of an engine design from STL. LM configuration freeze occurred in 1963, the same time Kaysing left Rocketdyne. So he couldn't have worked on any kind of prototype because when he left Rocketdyne NASA had not yet decided what the lunar module was intended to actually do.
Rocketdyne assisted Bell in working out fluid flow instabilities in the ascent engine, but that is the limit of Rocketdyne's contribution to the lunar module.
NASA reportedly learned from CIA spies in 1958 that Soviet scientists had determined moon walkers would need thick lead suits to avoid fatal doses of radiation.
No, the Soviets were smarter than that.
Kaysing had a security clearance. He would have had to in order to be a publications analyst. And so it's easy for him to simply make up things he alleges to have seen, but which no other researcher can verify. Except in this case Kaysing tips his hand. We know that Soviet researchers knew about what kinds of radiation to expect in cislunar space, and unless the Soviet scientists were complete boneheads we can presume they understood that lead is a poor choice for shielding against that type of radiation.
But an English major wouldn't necessarily know that. He'd only know about "radiation" as a singular phenomenon. He wouldn't necessarily know that lead is useful as shielding only for certain types of radiation because he wouldn't necessarily know that different types of radiation existed.
And we have to wonder why a field lab at Rocketdyne -- a pretty specialized engine company -- would have a CIA report about human factors in cislunar space.
This particular story makes a whole lot more sense as a fabrication by Bill Kaysing than as the truth.
So plans for a real landing were called off, the authors contend.
So in 1958 the U.S. finds out that it's impossible to land on the moon. Yet Kennedy is allowed to publicly challenge the U.S. three years later to do it before the end of the decade. And Nixon, who won't be president until ten years after this revelation, is credited with the hoax despite the fact that his political arch-rivals run the show in the interim.
And Armstrong, along with fellow astronaut Buzz Aldrin, were sent to an area near Quebec to film some phony moon walking shots ...
Quebec is huge. "Near Quebec" doesn't make a lot of sense.
"I'd love to believe that our astronauts were the first men to walk on the lunar surface," another investigator told a radio show host after reading the book and conducting his own research.
Whaddya think? James Collier, or Ralph Rene?
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