we Dark Mission The program ended with Hoagland promising to send Mitchell additional materials to review, and Mitchell agreeing to another mutual program to review the new material, Hoagland did send the pictures and other data, but Mitchell never responded, and the follow.tp program never took place, Yes, Virginia, We Really Went to the Moon Before we leave the Moon phase of the investigation, the authors feel ‘we must comment on a particularly damaging urban myth that has taken hold of the popular consciousness in the last few years. As we discussed in the Introduction, this idea (most recently advanced by a few well-known self promoters such as David Percy, Bill Kaysing and the late James Collier) had its origins as far back as the Apollo 11 mission itself. This myth is based on the simple—albeit naive and absurd~notion that the Apollo missions and subsequent Moon landings were “faked.” IENASA is eventually forced to admit that there is more to the Face on Mars than meets the eye, that maybe they missed something the first three times ‘around, or that there is truly something ancient and extraordinary on the Moon, then it will be crucial to have thoroughly discredited the “conspiracy theorists” ‘outthere (by the deliberate promotion and then effective debunking of obviously bad conspiracy theories like “We Never Went fo the Moon.”) If enough people can be convinced by this deliberate disinformation campaign that there are no NASA conspiracies then it will be much easier to sell the idea that NASA just sissed a couple of things on those Mars pictures all those years ago, Let us be clear: We are uniformly, unabashedly “conspiracy theorists,” and have—against, our willsbecome truly convinced that there has been a conscious, carefully planned and permanent coverup by NASA of some of its most extraordinary discoveries made in the course of the Agency's forty-year history. ‘That said one thing they did not do, unquestionably, was fake the Moon landings. In fact, most of the charges made by these “Moon Hoax” advocates are so absurd, so easily discredited and so lacking in any kind of scientific analysisChaptar Four: The Crystal Tawers of the Moon 3 {and just plain common sense) that they give legitimate conspiracy theories, lUike ours} a bad name (which is more than likely now the real objective-see below]. The comedy of errors and willful ignorance represented by the Moon, Hoax advocates is too extensive to detail here, We instead refer our readers to the "Who Mourns for Apollo?” series on Mike Bara’s Lunar Anomalies web site for a detailed, claim-by-claim dismantling of the whole Moon Hoax mythos. To reiterate our own political position: we have come, slowly and reluctantly, to believe that the entire "Moon Hoax myth" was, in fact, professionally instigated~and is currently being kept very much alive-by none ‘other than NAS! That, the myth forms the “perfect cover" against an entire {growing ..) segment of the population, who do increasingly suspect "the ‘government” is not telling them the truth about a fot of things... including ‘going to the Moon, So, as Hoagland observed firsthand at JPL all those years ago, NASA ‘carefully planned, from the beginning, to give those folks a “conspiracy.” alright, but-a fake conspiracy ...to cover up the real one. How else do you explain NASA formally commissioning James Oberg, a leading space authority, just last year (2006) to finally write an official NASA ook on “why the Moon Hoax crowd is ‘out to lunch.” Only, to have another part of NASA suddenly cancel Oberg’s contract .. abruptly withdrawing from publishing the one book which would have had a chance to finally lay out “why" and “how” the Agency really landed humans on the Moon—still, after over thirty years, its most astonishing achievment? Because “someone” wants—needs—the endless ambiguity of “did they relly, do it". to cover up what NASA really found The Golden Fleece ‘When bringing up the, admittedly, “totally unbelievable" Tunar data you. have seen presented in this Chapter, we inevitably get two questions objecting to our premise: “Why didn't the astronauts see these ruins, and then tell us all about them?" and “Why would you make domes out of glass, on a place like the Moon-with so many meteors and asteroids bombarding it all the time?”