MissioN By n@s@

Government Hides Alien Moon Base!

July 01, 2009

Now that I've got your attention . . .

Every time I take a stab at debunking pseudo-science topics like UFOs and the 2012-doomsday predictions, it’s like kicking a hornet’s nest, judging from some of the comments posted here.

Some of these counterpoint arguments from readers are tied to references in clips on YouTube (truly a cesspool of idiocy) where self-styled “experts” try and sound authoritative in front of the camera. More often than not these "whistle-blowers" assert having special knowledge about “government conspiracies.” They’ve discovered the Internet is a bottomless pit of people who feel powerless and suspicious of everything. Healthy skepticism is good, which means followers should not unequivocally swallow the tall tales from self-proclaimed "insiders."

Occasionally I’m going to give out a Pants-on-Fire award to those individuals who make outrageous claims that they know are outright fabrications (unless that are self-delusional). There are endless motives: selling books, videos, articles, going on a lecture circuit, getting onto radio shows or CNN’s Larry King Live (he loves UFO tall-tales), or simply bolstering their sense of self importance.

My first winner of the Pants-on-Fire Award is to former Air Force Sgt. Karl Wolfe who was referenced in a comment on this site.

Why he gets the Pants on Fire Award

1. NASA is a civilian agency that disseminates astronomical data, gleaned from interplanetary missions and space observatories, openly and freely to scientists in over three dozen countries around the world. In fact NASA photos from planetary flybys were given to the news media in real time. If there was an “alien base," say, as far away as Triton as photographed during the 1989 Voyager flyby of Neptune, we would have all seen it at the same moment NASA scientists did.

2. If a security clearances were needed first, a lot of scientists around the world would be bitterly and loudly complaining. Sgt. Wolfe’s claim that foreign nationals converged on the NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia to seen moon photos contradicts his whole "top security" yarn. Frankly, it’s the kind of hokey dreamed up scene you expect in a cheesy low budget TV miniseries. Also, the National Security Agency is down the road from me at Fort Meade, Maryland, not Virginia. Such a “Top Secret Photo Lab” would be here in Maryland, behind the NSA’s ring of razor-wire fences.

3 . 3. Sgt. Wolfe’s melodramatic account implies that a secret darkroom processed pictures from the Lunar Orbiters. In fact the data were printed in long strips that had to be pasted together to construct a full photograph. So a full picture was not “developed in the darkroom.”

4 . There is no rational for extraterrestrials to need a base on the moon, one of the few places in the solar system that is within reach of manned expeditions. Cleary, they would want to be stealthy, otherwise they would have landed at the United Nations or the White House by now (and, they are certainly camera shy). So, aliens would hide their base in the asteroid belt, or one of the Earth-sun Lagrangian points. If they went to the effort of coming here from light-years away, then tooling around the solar system is a piece of cake. You don’t have to hang out on the moon where it’s a sure bet you’re gonna get caught.

5. The lunar base structure described is terribly 20^th century and out of sync with what you'd expect from entities that are so advanced they've mastered interstellar travel. Wolfe describes a base with dish antennas (instead of laser beam-communications or something unrecognizably exotic). The moon base sounds like something straight out of a 1957 Japanese sci-fi flick I was watching the other night, The Mysterians, who also hide out on the lunar farside.

6. Lunar Orbiter photographs of these Keebler Cookie elf-inspired “mushroom shaped” bases are available for sale through the so-called Disclosure Project, described as a nonprofit research organization seeking the facts about “UFOs, extraterrestrial intelligence, classified advanced energy and propulsion systems.” Though “nonprofit” it has an online UFO Wal-Mart for buying all kinds of conspiracy books and videos. Some of these materials describe a New Age messianic spirituality around the UFO-nauts (which seems to me like the real hidden agenda here). Never mind that NASA’s Lunar Orbiter photo atlas of all 675 plates is readily available online and free, courtesy of your tax dollars. In fact NASA went to the effort of digitally reprocessing the Lunar Orbiter images for greater clarity. But according to Sgt. Wolfe NASA airbrushed out the alien stuff. I thought people only did that on Oprah Winfrey glamour shots.

So Mr Wolfe, you're so good at weaving a dramatic story, there's potential fame and fortune in taking a stab at writing Tom Clancy type novels. But please don't discredit the good folks at NASA with a high-tech fairy tale.