Investigating Possible Conspiracies and Cover-ups – JFK, The Moon

Landings, etc.

By Wade Frazier

Introduction

Gary Wean and the JFK Assassination

Assessing the Credibility of Gary’s Story, and How it Fits the Facts

The Backyard Photos

The Nature of the JFK Assassination Affair

Why Are There So Many Conspiracy Theories Today?

The Dangers of Investigating Conspiracies and Cover-ups

What about Those American Hostages in Iran?

9/11 – The Mother of all Conspiracy Theories

Is Anything Being Covered up about the Apollo Moon Landings?

Some Apollo Mission Anomalies

Possibilities regarding the Apollo anomalies

The Nature of the Moon Landings Debate

The Big Cover-up

Introduction
I was born in 1958, and had a fairly typical middle class suburban American childhood (fan of
Gilligan's Island and Star Trek). I was largely raised in Ventura, California; my mother ran the
household while my father worked to support the family. His entire career was spent working
for the federal government, and all but one year was spent working for the Department of
Defense. The nearby military bases employed most of the area’s professionals, so some of
my friends’ fathers (as well as several of my father’s friends) also worked for the military. If
anything, the political outlook I was raised with was fairly Cold War, but not too pronounced. I
was taught that the Soviets were the bad guys, and my family generally supported politicians
from the Democratic Party. My father was rather outraged when Nixon won the presidency in
1968, and I was saddened when Reagan beat Carter in 1980. My political outlook was a fairly
mainstream one, which means that I was ignorant. I read the newspaper virtually everyday,
from age 10 to 27, thinking that I was getting the “news.” I had some spiritual training that
came in handy later on, but I was like most people of my age, assimilating my indoctrination. I
kept my eyes open to see how closely reality matched my ideals, because I needed to honestly
believe in my ideals.

Upon graduating from college, I had a rather rude awakening, and indoctrination and ideals
brutally collided with reality. I eventually realized that my profession was virtually worthless,
although that full realization was not clear for several years. Then I met Dennis Lee, and was
able to live my dreams of trying to bring alternative energy to the world. After meeting Dennis,
I had a very rude awakening. That was when my political education began in earnest. Our
efforts at developing alternative energy were definitely the targets of conspiracies. Policemen
and others committed felonies while pursuing us, leading to the death of one woman. We
received offers to buy us out, which culminated in an offer probably in excess of $1 billion, to
bribe us to stop pursuing alternative energy. When Dennis rejected the offer made by
“European interests,” given through a CIA man, a month later Dennis was thrown into jail with a
million dollar bail, on fabricated charges.[1]

As Dennis attained national visibility with his free energy promotion, numerous people
approached us who had tried similar ventures, and we were told nightmarish stories of being
wiped out by conspiratorial activities. Kangaroo courts, prison and murder; threatening phone
calls in the night and hiding from the murderers were common tales, the kind that few
Americans hear first-hand. It became obvious that the energy industry has maintained its
technological monopoly by using extremely dirty tactics. It is one thing to hear the tales; it is
quite another to live through them.

The first alternative political literature I read, other than the Christian Science Monitor (which is
only slightly alternative), was conspiratorial literature, from conspiracies regarding instigating
our wars, to controlling the banking system, to eliminating the United States’ sovereignty.
While Dennis was still in jail, I was introduced to Noam Chomsky and the political left. Ever
since, I have studied scholarship such as Chomsky's far more than right-wing scholarship. I
consider left wing scholarship superior. They both explain how the world works. Their
perspectives can be divergent, but sometimes are nearly identical. It can be hazardous to
over-generalize, but right-wing scholarship is often centered on conspiracies, while left-wing
scholarship is more interested in the “structural” aspects of our system’s workings. The right
sees the activities as more conscious (conspiratorial), while the left sees it as more
unconscious (structural, institutional behavior). It probably has something to do with their
spiritual outlook, with fundamentalist Christians populating the right, and scientists and
rationalists populating the left. Both have their creation myths. The Christian right has the
book of Genesis, while the left has the Big Bang and evolution. One was conscious, while the
other was a big and unfathomable accident.

Each perspective has its strengths and weaknesses. The right can veer into outright paranoia,
seeing a conspiracy behind every bush, ignoring or underplaying the structural aspects of what
is happening. The police may throw people in jail for curing cancer, but may not know the real
reason they threw them in jail (or even care). They were just following orders.

The left often suffers from what Michael Parenti terms a “conspiracy phobia.”[2] It has a
tendency to see everything as a big accident, with institutional forces at play and few, if any,
individuals really controlling a situation’s outcome. It seems afflicted by too-often rejecting the
notion that people can be consciously malicious and act in concert. Only a small proportion of
our populace is devoted to “evil.” In the minds of those devoted to “evil,” they are simply
devoted to themselves. They see themselves as good guys, too. The dark path is simply
being devoted to one’s self at the extreme, and they have made self-service a science. All the
same, conscious evil is a small fraction of how the world works, which even Hitler admitted.
The rest is due to people’s actions when they feel threatened with loss, enticed by gain, and so
forth. Those on the dark path easily manipulate the herd of average people, who are
preoccupied with comfort and survival.

Gary Wean and the JFK Assassination

In early 1989, it appeared as if Dennis had no chance of living to see this side of the bars
again. There were a handful of people trying to save him from life in prison, and probably
being murdered while he was in there. Although our effort was the target of a wide-ranging
international conspiracy, Ventura County was also one of the United States’ most corrupt
counties, regularly ranking in the top ten most corrupt law enforcement jurisdictions (it has
even been ranked number one). Dennis was far from alone in being raped by Ventura
County’s legal system.

In Ventura County, one person in particular was standing up to the corruption. Gary Wean was
a sailor in World War II and became an LAPD policeman in 1946. Gary had the kind of career
that they make movies about. He moved back and forth between Ventura County and Los
Angeles a couple of times in the 1950s and 1960s. While in Los Angeles, Gary was at times a
motorcycle cop directing traffic, while at others he was a detective. He worked out of the
downtown and Hollywood precincts. Dealing with the escapades of politicians, celebrities and
gangsters was simply part of his job.

In 1947, he was pursuing an armed robber through the streets of Los Angeles on a high-speed
chase. The suspect crashed his car as it barreled along at ninety miles an hour through LA’s
streets. He tried escaping on foot, and Gary cornered him in the dark. The suspect begged for
his life. As Gary approached, the man stuck his pistol (which had already killed somebody
during the robbery) into Gary’s abdomen and fired. He fired a second shot that hit Gary in his
hand. Gary then emptied his pistol into the man, while his partner also fired, killing the robber
instantly. Gary’s partner rushed him to the hospital. Although Gary’s abdomen was in great
pain, he did not want to unbuckle his Sam Brown belt (a wide leather belt which held his
firearm and other police equipment) as they rushed to the hospital, because he thought it might
be all that was holding him together. When Gary finally took off his belt, his partner saw that
the bullet hit the belt and did not penetrate Gary’s skin.[3] That was a day in the life of an
LAPD cop. Below are images from that day.
 Click on image to enlarge.

Gary relates many amazing incidents in his book There's a Fish in the Courthouse. Gary was
from the old school: he believed in the ideal of law enforcement, and that through a properly
functioning legal system there could be a more just society.

When I met Gary in early 1989, he gave me the best advice I could get: no organization in
America would help Dennis, either governmental or private. Dennis’ experience was not that
unusual. U.S. judicial gangsterism was normal, but nearly always covered up or
misrepresented by the media, as they are an integral part of the system. Gary's advice kept
me from wasting my time seeking somebody in the United States government to help. Gary’s
insight helped lead to Dennis’ miraculous release from jail. In my hour of need, Gary was
generous with his time, sincere, and helpful.

The first edition of There's a Fish in the Courthouse was published in 1987, and tells of an
incredible meeting that Gary attended in late 1963. One of Gary's friends was Audie Murphy,
America's most decorated war hero who became a Hollywood movie star. During World War
II, Murphy took on hundreds of German soldiers and six tanks single-handedly near Holtzwihr
France, while he was firing a machine gun from atop a burning vehicle filled with explosives. It
stands as one of the most heroic feats from any war. Murphy suffered from “shell shock” (now
called Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome) for the rest of his life.

One of Murphy's friends was Bill Decker, the sheriff of Dallas County. Decker came to
California regularly on business, and when he came to town, Gary would arrange for Murphy,
Decker, himself and his partner to dine at the Police Academy. About two weeks after the JFK
assassination, in early December 1963, Decker was in town and they all had lunch together.
The topic of conversation quickly turned to what arms experts across the nation were
discussing: how could Oswald have made those shots with that poor shooting position and
mediocre rifle to kill John Kennedy? Nobody at that table thought it was possible for Oswald to
have made those shots. After they arrived at their conclusion, Decker told them that he knew
Oswald had not fired the shots, and that a man in Dallas wanted to talk to somebody about it.
Oswald died while being transferred to Decker’s custody. Decker knew somebody who could
set the record straight, and wanted to talk to somebody not connected to Dallas or
Washington. Murphy was interested, and the next week, Murphy, Gary and his partner were
flying to Ruidoso, New Mexico to meet Decker and his friend.

They met at the airport and went to a diner to talk. The man who came with Decker was
named John. According to John, Oswald was anything but a “lone nut.” He was a U.S.
intelligence agent acting under the direction of E. Howard Hunt. Oswald had been recruited
into military intelligence when he joined the Marines. His hanging out in an expensive Tokyo
nightclub as a private, his learning Russian at the highly sensitive U-2 base in Japan, his
defection to the Soviet Union and other oddities were all part of his intelligence career (which
probably began even before his Marine days, when he was a cadet in 1955 in David Ferrie’s
Civil Air Patrol unit. “Coincidentally,” Oswald began his “fascination” with communism at the
same time). Oswald was developing "communist" credentials for his future activities in
infiltrating communist organizations. It was a fairly normal American intelligence path.[4]

Oswald was inducted into CIA covert activities and came under Hunt’s direction. Hunt was a
major player in mounting the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, and he, as with many others in the
military and CIA, blamed Kennedy for the failure (Kennedy refused to call in openly American
air support). Hunt dreamed up the crazy assassination attempts on Castro that the United
States tried. His mission in life was eliminating Castro. Oswald came into his control, and was
thrown into the cauldron of the Cuban exile communities in Miami and New Orleans. Oswald
did not initially know what his mission would be.

Hunt was paranoid about Oswald's Russian wife, thinking that she might be a Russian spy, so
Oswald could tell her nothing about his activities. Oswald’s joining Fair Play for Cuba and his
staged “murder attempt” on General Walker were all part of giving Oswald “credentials” that
would make his upcoming performance more believable. Hunt had concocted the most bizarre
assassination intrigue of all time. Oswald was going to participate in a fake assassination
attempt on John Kennedy, and frame Castro for it. Oswald’s apparent visit to the Cuban
Embassy in Mexico City was part of laying an elaborate trail to Cuba. Hunt believed that if
Castro could be implicated in an assassination attempt on JFK, the American people could be
riled up into supporting an outright invasion of Cuba.

JFK was not aware of the fake assassination plan, but high-ranking officials in the government
and his administration were. Military intelligence, the FBI and the CIA were all involved.
Oswald was initially leery of Hunt’s plan, but with assurances and after seeing the high-level
people involved, he went along with it. Oswald was to fire his rifle into the air, then go into
hiding, and the false trail to Cuba was laid. He could come home to a hero’s welcome and live
a normal life after America had finished mopping up Cuba.

But something went horribly wrong. The fake assassination turned into a real one. Somebody
had infiltrated the operation, interposed the mission and killed JFK. The real assassins tried
killing Oswald after JFK was killed, but policeman Tippit was in the wrong place at the wrong
time and was killed. Oswald escaped, to be captured alive. John said that he knew that
Oswald would not have shot a policeman under any circumstances.

At the end of his mind-blowing tale, John handed over a thick manila envelope, sealed with
wax with a thumbprint on it, that contained the documents John said would prove his story.

Murphy, Gary and his partner went back to California. They knew that the situation was too big
and dangerous for them to pursue. John said that if he went public with his story, he would
quickly disappear, never to be heard from again. A few days after that meeting, Decker called
Murphy. As John was telling his story, the CIA and intelligence community was in shock. They
did not know what to do, paralyzed with fear. As they recovered from their shock, they saw
themselves facing the firing squad if their involvement in the assassination intrigue became
known. The intelligence community decided they would do everything they could to cover their
tracks, invoking “national security.” Decker told Murphy that John had given him the envelope
of documents in a moment of panic, and that if Murphy did not give the envelope back, he
would be “destroyed.” Murphy did some fast thinking and told Decker that they had torn the
envelope into pieces and threw them out of the airplane as they were flying back to California.

That is what Gary says he witnessed, and I believe him. In the first edition of his book, Gary
hid John's identity. Because John was dead when Gary published the second edition of his
book in 1996, Gary revealed that “John” was John Tower, the Senator from Texas and George
Bush’s little buddy who he nominated to be the Secretary of Defense.

Gary wrote his book in the early 1970s. New evidence keeps coming to light regarding the
JFK assassination. Because of what Gary saw, I knew that Oswald was not a lone nut. The
center of gravity of my research into the JFK assassination has been to see how it correlated
with Gary's testimony. Every piece of credible evidence I have seen supports Gary’s story, and
none contradicts it. Particularly impressive has been the recent revelations of Operation
Northwoods, where the U.S. government was going to stage terrorist acts in America to
manipulate Americans into supporting an invasion of Cuba. Gary’s story touches upon many
facets of the JFK assassination evidence, including Oswald's military intelligence days, his
association with the Cuban exiles, the “Texas Connection,” the “Republican Connection,” the
oilman connection, the George Bush connection, the CIA connection, the FBI connection and
others. Up until now (2002), Gary's testimony has been ignored by virtually everybody
involved in investigating the JFK assassination. Gary is the only surviving member of that
meeting with John Tower. Tower and Murphy both died in private plane “accidents” that may
not have been accidental.

Gary's career ended in Ventura County when he stumbled into corruption that boggles the
mind. Gary names names, and I knew some of the people he named in his book, and knew of
many of the events. I independently believed his version of some events before I met him.
When he encountered the corruption in Ventura, which ended his career, he fought back and
survived a murder attempt himself. Those who run Ventura County are judges on the Superior
Court, real estate developers, politicians and the like. According to Gary, political murder was
common in Ventura County, where judges, lawyers and other people who got in the way or
were expendable were murdered, sometimes by private plane “accidents,” mysterious
drownings, etc.

Hollywood has made many movies and TV shows about the police and crime in Los Angeles,
especially during the 1930s, 1940s and '50s, such as LA Confidential and Chinatown. Gary
worked out of the downtown and Hollywood precincts during his days as an LAPD cop. Later
in his career, he became an investigator for the LA District Attorney's Office. In the early days
of Gary’s career, he was assigned to keep watch on Mickey Cohen, who ran LA’s organized
crime operations. Cohen, Bugsy Siegel and Meyer Lansky were Jewish gangsters. Siegel
“built” Las Vegas. Cohen ran the LA crime scene for many years. In typical gangster style,
Cohen’s hangouts were often boxing arenas, racetracks, restaurants, etc. Gary followed
Cohen around as part of his job. One member of Cohen’s entourage, who Gary saw regularly,
was an aspiring lawyer who sat on the Ninth District Federal Court for many years. I saw his
name in the news a few years ago, and he is still a judge, at nearly 80 years of age in 2002.
The man is a gangster, and a federal judge, and the media and establishment has been
lavishing praise on him lately, with awards and hagiographic articles.

The connection between Frank Sinatra and organized crime is one of many in the
entertainment field (or the CIA, or George Bush, or Joe Kennedy, or entertainment and law
enforcement, such as Elvis Presley and the FBI, or the FBI and organized crime). Along with
good food and pretty women, first-class entertainment is another gangster perk. Gangsters
keep entertainers as their “pets” when they can. The Las Vegas connection and entertainment
is a case in point. Cohen was deeply involved in the Hollywood scene.

One of Cohen’s specialties was blackmailing celebrities, such as obtaining compromising

photographs of them to use as leverage. The Mafia had the goods on FBI director J. Edgar
Hoover, a transvestite. Because of their blackmail, Hoover publicly denied organized crime’s
existence, and the FBI rarely tried prosecuting them. When Robert Kennedy prosecuted
organized crime when he was Attorney General, he was breaking the unwritten rules.

One of Cohen's successes involved Lana Turner. Johnny Stompanato was a good-looking,
aspiring Italian gangster, one of the gangster wannabees that filled Los Angeles in those days.
The LA hookers said that the Italian Stallion Stompanato was the best bedroom performer in
LA, and Cohen arranged for him to meet Turner. The romance flourished. Cohen paid for a
deluxe motel suite for the lovers. The bed was wired for sound. Cohen got a recording of
Stompanato and Turner going at it. Cohen had two thousand copies pressed of Turner’s
squeals of ecstasy. It became a hit at Hollywood parties. Some said that it was one of
Turner’s finest performances. It made Cohen a lot of money, as he sold the record for fifty
dollars a copy. Turner’s daughter eventually murdered Stompanato, creating one of
Hollywood’s bigger scandals. That recording became the “must have” item after Stompanato’s
death, and Cohen pressed thousands more records, making big money.

As Gary followed Cohen, sometimes putting him under sophisticated surveillance, Gary met
members of Cohen’s entourage. In 1946, Gary saw somebody new with Cohen at the
racetrack. In 1947, he bumped into him at a restaurant he was watching. The man knew Gary
was a cop, yet they had an interesting conversation. The man introduced himself as Jack
Ruby. His real name was Jacob Rubenstein, and he worked with Mick Cohen. Ruby openly
told Gary that the mob was focusing its operations on New Orleans and Havana, where the
action was. With World War II over, the West Coast was not really the happening place
anymore. Ruby murdered Oswald, and Gary presents intriguing evidence regarding the
organized crime connection with the JFK assassination.

In 1948, the state of Israel was established. Menachem Begin eventually became Israel's
Prime Minister. Begin was a member of the Irgun terrorist group. He helped blow up a hotel,
killing many people. When Begin was the Israeli Prime Minister, he could not visit Britain,
because he was wanted for murder there. The people who established Israel were extremely
violent. Mick Cohen became involved with Begin, and became an arms dealer for Israel, which
is not surprising to anybody who has done any digging into the CIA’s alliances. Cohen said
that his Jewish blood made him such a fervent supporter of Israel, but he was likely in it for the
money, as usual.

In Israel’s early days, their relationship with the United States was not happy, and was
particularly troubled during the Eisenhower administration.[5] It was not until the war of 1967,
when Israel proved itself a murderously aggressive power in the Middle East, grabbing huge
chunks of land from its neighbors, that the United States began its massive and unconditional
support of Israel, which is the biggest foreign aid project the world has ever seen. In 1960, the
U.S. presidential election was between Nixon (Eisenhower’s vice president) and John
Kennedy.
Kennedy was a legendary philanderer, and Cohen and friends tried exploiting JFK’s
proclivities. According to legend, John Kennedy met Marilyn Monroe through a connection
with Frank Sinatra. Right there is a possible organized crime connection, but Gary says that
another member of the “rat pack,” Joey Bishop (who knew Cohen well - Gary says that Bishop
even worked for Cohen), came up with the idea of introducing Monroe to JFK, and Gary looked
in on Peter Lawford’s (JFK’s in-law) Malibu party where JFK and Monroe were introduced, in
1960, during the Democratic national convention.

As with Stompanato and Turner, Cohen underling Georgie Piscitelli became Monroe’s lover.
Cohen got a tape of them in bed together and played it for Jimmy Hoffa, the Teamster boss
who later received cement shoes from the Mafia, and who was then feeling the heat from
Attorney General Bobby Kennedy. They promised Hoffa a tape of JFK and Monroe in bed
together (so Hoffa could blackmail JFK into calling off Bobby Kennedy’s efforts), but could
never deliver. Monroe was being used as the world’s highest-class hooker.[6] Cohen and
friends wanted to know what Kennedy's intentions towards Israel were. Monroe was supposed
to elicit it during pillow talk. Monroe was controlled by mobsters and was kept on all manner of
narcotic. When she became increasingly uncontrollable and potentially dangerous if she
publicly talked about what was happening, she was murdered. Gary had Cohen under
surveillance, and caught him and Begin having a conversation in Yiddish in a diner. They were
talking about Kennedy, Israel, how much money Kennedy was wasting on the Peace Corps
and other programs.

Gary's testimony regarding JFK, John Tower, Marilyn Monroe, Menachem Begin, Jack Ruby
and Mick Cohen is just part of his amazing tale, which he published at great risk. The only JFK
assassination book I am aware of that even mentions Gary is Final Judgment, by Michael
Collins Piper, who heavily relies on Gary’s testimony. Gary thinks that Jewish gangsters were
involved in interposing Hunt’s grand scheme. That does not mean that Allen Dulles (the CIA
chief whom Kennedy fired over the Bay of Pigs, and who later served on the Warren
Commission), J. Edgar Hoover, George Bush and others were not also involved in interposing
Hunt’s scheme, playing Hunt for a chump.

Piper is a reporter for The Spotlight, which I subscribed to for years. It has understandably
been described as a neo-Nazi, anti-Semitic publication. The culmination of Gary's book is
uncovering a vast Jewish crime organization. It is different from the Italian Mafia, as its
members are judges, politicians and other public figures. It is a highly intelligent crime
organization, using the pen more than the gun to achieve its goals. The most powerful
criminals do not break the laws: they make and enforce the laws, to serve their own interests,
not the public’s.

Gary has suffered greatly at the hands of Jewish gangsters. Consequently, I believe he has
taken his Jewish theorizing a little too far, but it is understandable. During my days with Dennis
and the horror I lived through, I thought policemen and lawyers were among the lowest forms
of life. I have since revised my views, but I understand how brutal treatment at the hands of
Jewish gangsters can lead to overgeneralizations regarding the Jewish people.

The Jewish people have had a very rough ride, especially at Christendom’s hands. The
flocking of Jews to Southern California was just one more chapter in their long journeys, trying
to find a place in the Christian world where they would not be discriminated against, or
murdered en masse. Consequently, Jews entered new industries such as the entertainment
industry in Hollywood, and some took advantage of Prohibition, just as Italian criminals did.
Cohen, Siegel and Lansky were part of a uniquely American phenomenon. What Gary ran
into, a Jewish underworld where the criminals were bankers, judges, lawyers, politicians and
others, is an understandable Jewish variation of organized crime. The Jewish gangsters also
sought “invisibility,” which is also common in corporate and other power games.

Even though Gary has taken his theorizing about the Jewish people too far, he is correct when
he says that Jewish apologists have been using the cry of “anti-Semitism” as a club to prevent
anybody from criticizing Israel (and Gary says the same tactic prevents the exposure of Jewish
gangster activities). Noam Chomsky says the same thing about how the cry of anti-Semitism
is being used to deflect criticism of the Israeli state.[7] So does Native American scholar Ward
Churchill.[8] Jewish scholars are definitely guilty of playing up the Jewish Holocaust and its
imagined historical exclusivity, to the point where some have denied the Gypsy Holocaust of
World War II. Gypsies were subject to the same extermination policies as the Jews were,
dying alongside the Jews in the same death camps. All the same, the far-right scholarship that
argues that the Jewish Holocaust never happened, or was never intended by the Nazis, is, in
the words of Ward Churchill, “tripe.” If one is not familiar with scholarship’s “rules,” the-Jewish-
Holocaust-Never-Happened scholarship can appear reasonable. Far right scholarship on the
subject is extremely biased, and is often appallingly bad. Typically, they use a few “facts” to
establish their arguments, but then liberally add rumor, supposition and fabrication into the mix
to construct their hypothesis.

All disinformation has “truth” and “facts” in it (which is what makes it plausible), and to the
uninitiated can unfortunately be convincing. Probably the main reason Gary’s testimony is
dismissed is because of his fervent writings about Jewish gangsters, and generalizations about
the Jewish people that can easily be labeled anti-Semitic. In 1998, I submitted a brief essay
about Gary’s testimony to a JFK assassination forum, and the only response was to flame me,
call my writing a “fairy tale,” call Murphy a “coward” and Gary a “Nazi.” Yet, Gary’s theories
have virtually nothing to do with what Gary says he witnessed. I believe everything that Gary
says he saw, including his meeting with John Tower, and Jews do not come up in the John
Tower conversation at all.

The surfacing of the Operation Northwoods documents in 2001, however, may make Gary’s
testimony vastly more credible, as Tower’s tale is very similar to the plans as depicted in the
Operations Northwoods documents. I have spent hundreds of hours looking into the JFK
assassination evidence since 1989, and I have never seen any piece of credible evidence
contradict Gary’s testimony, and evidence has kept appearing during the past fourteen years
that keeps confirming it. The next section will deal Gary’s account of John Tower and JFK, and
how it fits today’s evidence.

Assessing the Credibility of Gary’s Story, and How it Fits the Facts
Up until now, Gary’s testimony regarding Tower and JFK has been ignored by, or unknown to,
nearly everybody involved in the JFK assassination controversy. This section is written in the
hope that the recent Operation Northwoods revelations will spark more interest in Gary’s tale.
James Bamford, the author who brought the Northwoods documents to American attention in
his Body of Secrets (an Australian work, Jon Elliston’s 1999 Psy War on Cuba, first publicly
disclosed the documents, but the book was ignored in the U.S.), wrote that the Northwoods
plan “may be the most corrupt plan ever created by the U.S. government.”[9] There is plenty of
competition for “most corrupt plan” in American history.

George Washington, probably America’s richest man when he became president, whose
fortune was anything but “clean,” designed the blueprint to steal the North American continent
from Native Americans, by forcing them to cede their lands in treaties that the U.S. government
would never honor. Washington’s plan was quickly adopted by the Continental Congress, and
was U.S. official policy until there were virtually no more native lands left to steal. Thomas
Jefferson told Big Lies to both the British and Spanish ambassadors about U.S. intentions
th
toward North American lands. The U.S. government during the 19 century was more openly
corrupt than in the twentieth century.

th
The 20 century began with the U.S. consolidating its theft of the last shreds of Spain’s
colonial lands, which began with robber baron William Randolph Hearst whipping up the
American people to invade Cuba, to “free them” from Spain (under the false pretense that
Cuba sank an American warship in Havana Harbor). The lie of the U.S.’ “noble intentions” was
immediately laid bare when it also seized the Philippines, and then engaged in a genocidal
attack against the Filipinos when they tried becoming independent of the new imperial
overlords. To the Filipinos, it mattered little if the overlords were Spanish, American or
Japanese. While the U.S. was still digesting its land grabs from Spain, it engaged in its first
experiment in neocolonialism, with the outright theft and fabrication of Panama, separating it
from Colombia, and then the U.S. immediately split it with the Panama Canal Zone. The
United States invaded Latin America at will after the creation of Panama.

Panama was a free nation in name only. Wall Street lawyer William Nelson Cromwell ran the
“free Panama” operation. He was a founder of the Sullivan and Cromwell law firm. In the
Panama operation, Cromwell ran a syndicate largely bankrolled by J.P. Morgan, and the
American taxpayer was ultimately swindled by their subterfuge, in the biggest single payment
the American government had ever made, up to that time. John Foster Dulles inherited
Cromwell’s empire. Dulles became Eisenhower’s Secretary of State, and his brother Allen ran
the CIA. Both men were partners in Sullivan and Cromwell. Allen and John Foster were
particularly fond of Nazi Germany, heavily investing in it during the 1930s. After World War II
ended, Allen quickly “rehabilitated” Hitler’s biggest cheerleaders in German banking and
industry, and put them right back into the positions they enjoyed while supporting Hitler’s
regime.

John Foster Dulles’ behaviors while serving as Eisenhower’s Secretary of State added a new
word to the dictionary: brinksmanship. Dulles’ notion of diplomacy with the Soviet Union was
threatening it with nuclear attack. The Cromwell-Dulles empire was quite active in Latin
America. One of Sullivan and Cromwell’s clients was the Rockefeller-owned United Fruit,
which “owned” Guatemala. In 1951, Jacobo Arbenz became Guatemala’s president, and he
nationalized some of United Fruit’s unused land, with a plan to compensate them for it. Arbenz
was a fan of Franking Roosevelt, and tried building a New Deal-style economy in Guatemala.
Citing the “international communist conspiracy” fantasy, the Dulles brothers engineered the
overthrow of Arbenz in 1954, and the Guatemalan people were treated to a string of brutal
U.S.-puppet-dictators for more than the next thirty years, which took hundreds of thousands of
lives, while the entire nation (except for the ruling class) lived in misery. The year before
overthrowing the Guatemalan government, the Dulles brothers reacted to Iran’s attempt to
nationalize Britain’s oil monopoly by overthrowing the Iranian government. The U.S. began
taking over Middle East oil on behalf of the American oil companies, which “coincidentally” also
served Rockefeller interests. The Shah’s reign was one of the bloodier chapters in modern
Middle East history.

The 1950s also saw the U.S. invasion of Korea, and millions were killed. Those were also the
years of the McCarthy witch hunts and the marketing of industrial waste to Americans as
“medicine.” So, corruption was far from unknown, especially during that era, and far right,
anti-communist hysteria was imbedded in America’s psyche as deeply as any catechism ever
was. People such as Ralph McGehee eventually realized what a Big Lie the anti-communist
ideology was. It was a smokescreen designed to disguise and protect imperial/corporate
prerogatives.

When Castro’s boys finally overthrew a U.S. puppet in Latin America in 1959, the super-hawks
in the Eisenhower administration could barely contain themselves. As with most who have
been called “communist,” Castro was originally simply an anti-imperialist, and Cuba has long
had Latin America’s highest standard of living, ever since the Cuban Revolution (there are no
homeless in Cuba, something the U.S. could learn from). The thought that other Latin
American nations might follow Cuba’s example and break free of American domination was
intolerable, and in the 1960s and 1970s the U.S. overthrew more than a dozen elected Latin
Americas governments and installed U.S.-backed dictatorships, some of which were among
th
the 20 century’s bloodiest regimes.[10] The official reason why America has named Cuba a
pariah nation, and led economic warfare against it for more than forty years, is because of its
“human rights” violations. The American-puppet governments in Guatemala and El Salvador
during the 1980s make Castro’s Cuba appear saintly on the human rights issue. The same
goes for today’s Colombia (earth’s most violent nation), as the Colombian government receives
vast sums of arms from the U.S., to “fight terror.” The rationale used to be to fight
“communists,” and then “drug dealers” after the Soviet Union collapsed, and now we are
fighting “terror” in Colombia. What will the next rationale be? The same peasants are being
killed, and the same oil companies are rubbing their hands at the prospects of exploiting the
region.

Eisenhower was rather incensed that the Cuban Revolution came during his watch, and asked
his military leaders to “think of manufacturing something that would be generally acceptable” to
justify invading Cuba. Eisenhower even harbored those ideas as a lame duck president, soon
before JFK’s inauguration.[11] Shortly before Eisenhower left office, he appointed a hawk
among hawks, General Lyman Lemnitzer, to be the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
(JCS). Lemnitzer thoroughly distrusted civilian politicians, and felt that the military should run
the American government. Ironically, Lemnitzer’s kind may be just what Eisenhower was
warning against when he ominously spoke of the growing power of the “military-industrial
complex,” three days before he left office.

The antagonism between the military and CIA goes back to World War II, when Wild Bill
Donovan and other Wall Street lawyers and executives founded and ran the Office of Strategic
Services (OSS - the direct forerunner of the CIA), and they prevailed in the battle over who ran
the U.S. intelligence scene, and quickly hired Nazis to staff the CIA after World War II was
over.
JFK came to office as the CIA was about to mount an invasion of Cuba. Lemnitzer knew it
would be a disaster, but remained silent. The Bay of Pigs debacle cost Allen Dulles his job, but
did nothing to cool the hawks’ ardor. While E. Howard Hunt, who planned the Bay of Pigs
operation (and would later plan the Watergate break-in), was devising plans to assassinate
Castro, with plans seemingly out of Maxwell Smart’s spy manual, General Lemnitzer and
friends devised plans to justify invading Cuba, and Operation Northwoods was conceived.
Although some caution is warranted regarding the authenticity of the Northwoods documents,
they are in step with the times, and what the Joint Chiefs of Staff were thinking in those days.
Not even the establishment-defending mainstream media is disputing the documents’
authenticity. Only some of the far right fringe is disputing them, to my knowledge, and they
have yet to make a persuasive case. The documents appear genuine, and only came to light
when Oliver Stone’s film JFK inspired the creation of the Assassination Records Review Board
(ARRB), which was formed in 1994.

An ARRB member allegedly tipped off Bamford as to the documents’ existence, and they might
be the only documents like them to survive Lemnitzer’s document-destroying fervor. What
kinds of plans are in the Northwoods documents? An early idea was to stage a fake attack on
the Guantanamo Bay naval base in Cuba. The Northwoods ideas became increasingly
extreme, and one plan was blowing up the rocket that John Glenn was about to fly in, and pin it
on Cuba somehow. They planned plane hijackings and bombings of American cities. One
plan that has received attention from the 9/11 conspiracy theorists was to stage an incident
over Cuba with a drone plane made to look like an airliner. The plane would self-destruct over
Cuba, to make it appear as if the Cubans shot it down. Lemnitzer reported to John McNamara,
JFK’s Secretary of Defense. Lemnitzer increasingly fell from grace in the JFK administration,
and a few days after Lemnitzer tried broaching his grand plan to McNamara, JFK told
Lemnitzer that there was no chance of the U.S. ever using direct military force against Cuba.
That was in 1962, and Lemnitzer soon lost his job as the JCS chairman, but Bamford wrote,
“Even after Lemnitzer lost his job, the Joint Chiefs kept planning ‘pretext’ operations at least
into 1963.”[12]

Having the military and government cooking up plans, no matter how insane, bloody or evil
they might seem, does not mean they were ever approved or implemented. When McNamara
was confronted with the Northwoods revelations, he denied that Lemnitzer ever showed him
the plan, which may have been true. JFK’s speechwriter Theodore Sorensen also denied such
a plan, saying that it would have been “illegal” and “unwise.” Being illegal and unwise has
rarely stopped the U.S. government from doing anything, particularly during the current “War
on Terror” and impending invasion of Iraq. Before the Soviet Union set off its first nuclear
bomb, the U.S. military had a plan for dropping dozens of atomic bombs on the Soviet Union,
and then using the U.S.’ Nazi-allies to finish the job. Cooler heads prevailed, thankfully.
Similarly, after the U.S. dropped atom bombs on Japan, there were still die-hard Japanese
generals who did not want to surrender. The man who designed the kamikaze attack strategy
proposed a post-Hiroshima plan to sacrifice about twenty million Japanese citizens in a special
kamikaze attack. Once again, sanity prevailed. It is not imprudent to believe that the
Northwoods documents are genuine, and that Lemnitzer and friends seriously pondered them.

Whether the Northwoods plan was ever implemented, or capable of implementation, is not the
point of this essay. The point is that the Northwoods plan was eerily similar to the tale that
Gary Wean reported. The plan that John Tower spoke of seems to have been a CIA parallel to
the JCS plan, or perhaps its offspring. The plans are so similar in aims and means, that to not
take Gary’s testimony seriously is to ignore the evidence. Not only are the plans remarkably
similar, with one targeting the America public for “terror,” and the other targeting the head of
state, but it is widely recognized that the Gulf of Tonkin incident of 1964 was either
exaggerated or fabricated by the U.S. government, in the spirit of the Northwoods plan,
something that was not lost on Bamford in his latest book. I know somebody who worked for
the U.S. Navy in 1964, and he told me that some of his work was used by the Navy to fabricate
the Gulf of Tonkin incident. The Gulf of Tonkin incident initiated the devastation of Southeast
Asia, which killed several million people, and the U.S. government’s motives were obviously
fraudulent.

Fabricating incidents to justify invasion is a very old game. The United States
initiated/fabricated a border incident to justify the huge land grab known as the Mexican-
American War. Hitler probably had his boys burn the Reichstag to “justify” his police state, and
Hitler’s lads dressed up concentration camp inmates in Polish uniforms to fabricate a border
incident to justify invading Poland, which began World War II. The Japanese attack on Pearl
Harbor was certainly no “surprise” to the American military brass, and there is substantial
evidence that the American men in Pearl Harbor were sacrificed to lure the isolationist
American people into World War II. Michael Ruppert and others have presented compelling
evidence that the World Trade Center attacks had prior knowledge by many people, and may
have been “allowed to happen,” with foreknowledge perhaps extending to the White House. In
1998, Zbigniew Brzezinski openly bragged about the U.S. arming and inciting the Afghani
“rebels” as a way to lure the Soviet Union into Afghanistan and its “Vietnam.” Brzezinski’s little
plan killed and/or devastated many millions of people, as he played his global chess game.
Thinking that Hunt’s alleged plan is “too far out” is to be ignorant of history, and/or falling prey
to the myth of American exceptionalism, as every nationalist ideology encourages.[13]

Gary wrote most of his book during the early 1970s, as he was trying to survive what the
gangsters who ran Ventura County were dishing out, and his wife typed it up. He first
published his book in 1987. Gary’s book is more like a diary than anything else, and is
certainly not a work of scholarship. Because I know Gary a little, and he and I lived in the
same milieu for awhile (bearing the brunt of evil dished out by the same people), and I got to
see his integrity and helpfulness in action, I have always believed what he reports as his
experiences. Not only did I have experiences like his, I have since come into contact with a
man who was a policeman in Ventura when Gary was working there, and he has vouched for
some events that Gary described, as he saw them too. Gary’s theories, particularly about the
Jewish mob and Jewish people, I have considerable skepticism about. True skepticism,
however, means pursuing the truth, not dismissing something out of hand, with a priori
reasoning, as the “skeptical” crowd has a penchant for. People who survive Gary’s kind of
experiences are not going to publish a book like his in the hopes that it makes a lot of money,
or deceives the public, but to tell a story that needs to be told. In that regard, Gary is like
Ralph McGehee, Rodney Stich and Dennis Lee, and he will always have my greatest respect
for his courage and willingness to face the dark underbelly of our vaunted system, and try to do
something about it. There are not many like Gary, whatever extremes of theorizing his
arduous journey may have led him to engage in.

Even if Gary’s timing of the Tower conversation is discounted (three weeks after the
assassination), or when Gary wrote about it (about ten years later), many details of the Tower
conversation did not come into public awareness until after Gary first published his book in
1987. The Northwoods documents and the plans for framing Cuba have not come into public
awareness until relatively recently. The revelations of what really happened between the U.S.
and Cuba during the 1960s did not start becoming public knowledge until the 1990s, after the
Soviet Union collapsed and documents began coming forward from the former Soviet Union.
Ironically, researchers have often encountered more document availability in the former Soviet
Union than they have in the United States. Some revelations have been chilling, such as the
fact that during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, when JFK administration hawks wanted to
invade Cuba, there were already numerous nuclear-armed missiles in Cuba, aimed at the U.S.
and ready to go. The Soviet commander in charge of the Cuban nukes admitted that if the
United States had invaded Cuba, he would have fired the nukes. It is the closest the world has
ever come to a nuclear holocaust, and it was only JFK’s overriding his hawks that kept (a very
short lived) World War III from happening. In light of those revelations, a plan to frame Castro
to justify invading Cuba is right out of Dr. Strangelove.

A significant possible connection between Lemnitzer’s plan and Tower’s tale is General Edwin
Walker. Walker was Lemnitzer’s soul brother, Walker being a John Birch Society member, as
well as a KKK member. Walker helped initiate a “race riot” in Little Rock in 1961, and handed
out John Birch material to his troops. Walker’s antics cost him his career, and a pre-JFK-
assassination Senate investigation into Walker suspected that Lemnitzer was connected to
Walker’s efforts. Oswald’s “assassination attempt” on Walker sure raises more suspicion than
it did before the Northwoods documents surfaced, particularly in light of Gary’s tale. To top it
off, they supposedly let Oswald keep the rifle he “shot at” Walker with, so he could “kill” JFK
with it. That is one of many astounding irregularities in Oswald’s tale, vis-à-vis law
enforcement.

The framing Cuba angle was certainly not in public awareness in 1963 or 1987, and I believe
that only with the Northwoods documents, which did not come to American public awareness
until 2001, that the framing Cuba angle has become publicly known as government policy. For
cautious researchers, it would be most prudent to compare Gary’s book versus what was
publicly known in 1987. There is plenty of JFK-associated evidence that has come to light
since 1987, which further confirms Gary’s tale, but it will be up to other researchers, not me, to
nail down what all those pieces might be. I want to paint a possible picture that accounts for
Gary’s reporting, and I have little doubt that the bulk of his reporting of the John Tower
conversation is straight as Gary can tell it, with perhaps some minor shading of it,
unconsciously, by events that happened after the Tower conversation, and before Gary wrote
about it.

If Gary’s tale is true, many people around the “fake assassination” project were unaware that it
would turn into a real assassination, especially Lee Harvey Oswald. Up until 11/22/63,
America was in denial about a lot of things, and the naïveté of Americans back then was fairly
astonishing, with about 85% of Americans having “great faith” in America’s institutions
(governments, corporations, churches, etc.), a number that is only about 15% today (or even
lower, in these “War on Terror,” priest-pedophilia, Enron days). However, many lived lives of
quiet desperation, with American housewives being the biggest customer class of Valium when
it was introduced in the 1950s, to keep them doped up so they could try acting the part of June
Cleaver; getting the newspaper, dinner, slippers and pipe ready for her husband, as he
returned home from the office or factory.
Until the bullets hit JFK, Oswald, Hunt, Tower and quite a few others were probably being
played as chumps by whoever pulled off the JFK hit. The fabrication of Oswald’s trail to Cuba,
his “commie” credentials and the like were probably not done as carefully as they would be
today. That is because the American public was so trusting, they would swallow anything that
officialdom told them. Whether that was in fact true, it is reasonable to think that Hunt and
friends operated under that assumption. In Hunt’s designs, the trail to Cuba would not be
subject to much public scrutiny, and would only be needed until the Cuban invasion and Castro
overthrow was complete.

Oswald was seen in the book depository lunchroom soon after JFK’s shooting, and the Warren
Commission had to construct an involved scenario to explain Oswald’s alleged movements.
The evidence tends to support the idea that Oswald sat in the lunchroom the entire time period
surrounding the assassination.[14] If the mission was interposed, Oswald would have certainly
not have been in the “sniper’s nest” as a real assassination was being carried out. The likeliest
series of events was that Oswald was told to go to the lunchroom and await further orders, or
perhaps wait for a phone call. It is hard to say when Oswald realized that he had been set up,
but it was probably less than a minute after JFK was shot. The “fake” plan would have called
for Oswald to leave the building anyway, as even a fake hit would have brought plenty of
attention onto the book depository. Because of the Magic Bullet’s wildly improbable tale, I think
it likely that people on the real assassination team set up the “sniper’s nest.”[15]

If Hunt’s operation was infiltrated, it is hard to know just who was on the “inside” and who was
not. Even on Oswald’s “team,” it is hard to know who was really on the inside in Dallas, and
who was among Hunt’s chumps. The story generally agreed upon is that Oswald left the book
depository before police sealed the building, and walked seven blocks to catch a bus. He soon
left the bus and took a cab.[16] Depending on what testimony and evidence is believed,
Oswald entered the movie theater before policeman J.D. Tippit was murdered, or soon
afterward. If Oswald was the intelligence operative Tower said he was, he may have had a
“double,” and the double may have been in town as part of the real hit team. Whatever the real
events were, according to Tower’s tale, Oswald realized that he was set up, and was doing his
best to stay out of jail, and alive. He always referred to himself as a patsy, which is not the
stance one would expect for an assassin.

If Tower’s tale is true, Oswald’s trail to Cuba may have been fabricated, perhaps including his
trip to the Cuban embassy in Mexico City. The photographic record in his military and CIA files
may well be fabricated or altered. If Tower’s tale is true, there is little information that came
from the FBI or CIA that can be relied upon, which includes nearly all the evidence that the
Warren Commission considered, because the “investigators” for the Warren Commission were
the FBI and CIA. The Warren Commission accepted at face value the CIA and FBI-produced
evidence, with Allen Dulles on the commission (probably a case of the fox watching over the
hens).

When Gary said that Tower spoke of Hunt inventing the “exploding cigar” tactic to assassinate
Castro, it could have been a slight mis-remembrance by Gary, or Tower had it slightly wrong
(those events did not become public until after the Watergate Scandal and the Church
Committee began looking into the CIA’s adventures, which was after Gary first drafted his
book), as Hunt tried poisoning Castro’s cigar, not make an exploding one.[17] That is a minor
quibble with Gary’s work. However, the big picture of Gary’s story - that Oswald was an
intelligence agent working for Hunt, to stage a fake assassination attempt to frame Castro -
has a rich correspondence with several lines of evidence. Gary’s story fits startlingly with the
main lines of evidence and speculation that has cropped up about Oswald, and there is
enough uncertainty regarding various details that I have seen no credible avenue of evidence
and theory regarding a conspiracy that Gary’s testimony may not fit with. With the Northwoods
revelations, the JFK assassination community can no longer easily dismiss/ignore Gary’s
testimony, as it has been doing for the past fifteen years. Joseph Milteer’s prediction of the
JFK hit has been taken seriously by most JFK researchers, even though he was a right wing,
KKK-type of guy. Gary was a policeman and investigator, with a solid career going until he ran
afoul of the gangsters that run Ventura County. Does him being Audie Murphy’s friend count
for anything, as far as his credibility? If nothing else, the Northwoods documents may end up
giving Gary’s tale due consideration.

Gary’s experiences with Jack Ruby, Mick Cohen and the Jewish mob angle also need to be
considered, as Ruby assassinated Oswald, and Gary was there in that milieu, even chatting
with Ruby in 1947 about the mob’s plans for New Orleans and Cuba.[18]

In 2006, I encountered two Internet forums that were earnestly discussing Gary's encounter
with John Tower and Audie Murphy. They were about the first worthy discussions that I had
seen of that issue, and I discovered that Gary passed away in 2004. I had rewarding
exchanges with one forum, and had some exchanges with an impressive investigator. The
investigator told me that he does not know of any piece of credible evidence that contradicts
Gary's story, and knows of no reason why his tale would not be true.

There are numerous lines of JFK evidence to pursue, an undertaking that could take the rest of
a person’s life. This essay will deal with just one aspect of the JFK assassination evidence in
detail, and people can make up their own minds regarding the truth of the issue, and see if it is
worth pursuing further.

The Backyard Photos

On the day of JFK's assassination, after Oswald was arrested, the police searched the home
where his estranged wife lived. Oswald was accused of murdering the head of state of the
world’s most powerful nation, and the investigation was underway. It is difficult to imagine a
murder investigation that would have been carried out with more zeal and thoroughness than
nd
that one. The Dallas police descended on Ruth Paine’s house on November 22 , where
Oswald's wife Marina lived, and where Oswald stayed the night before. Ms. Paine let the
police come in and search, even though they did not have a search warrant. Oswald's
possessions were largely stored in Ms. Paine's garage, which was attached to the house. The
police thoroughly searched the premises that day. It is difficult to imagine any significant items
of Oswald’s left in that house or garage after they searched it. That place should have been
stripped to the walls, and indeed the police seized many items that day.

After the Dallas police thoroughly searched the place the day of the assassination, another
search "discovered" two photographs the next day. In the photos, Oswald is shown holding the
rifle and radical newspapers. In the two inventories the police made of Oswald's possessions,
those photos are not mentioned. Also, detective Gus Rose, the man who discovered the
photos, testified that he found two negatives. Only one has ever been produced (a vast
amount of evidence disappeared during the JFK investigation, the second negative just one
piece of many[19]). To add more intrigue to the photos’ discovery, assassination researcher
Jim Marrs talked with Robert Hester, a photo technician who assisted the FBI and police in the
assassination’s wake. Hester said he saw the FBI in possession of a color transparency of the
backyard photo the day before the Dallas police “discovered” it. Unfortunately, with Hester
since passing on, it is only hearsay by Marrs at this time, and always will be, although Marrs
says Hester's wife also confirmed the story.[20]

Oswald was shown those photos the day after the assassination, when they were
"discovered." What did Oswald say about the photos? He said they were not photographs of
him, but photos of somebody else with his head pasted on, and that he had never seen the
photos before. Oswald said that he would be able to prove that those pictures were fakes. All
Oswald was able to prove was his mortality, as Jack Ruby gunned him down the next day.
With Oswald dead and unable to defend himself, the wheels of the government and media
turned, and Oswald was eventually pronounced the lone assassin of JFK.

During the Warren Commission investigation those photographs became known as exhibits
133-A and 133-B.

Warren Exhibit 133-A Warren

Exhibit 133-B

Click on images to enlarge

Life put 133-A on its cover in 1964. The negative to 133-A has never been produced. Only the
negative to 133-B has been found. If that ended the tale of "discovering" the photographs, it
would be enigmatic enough, but the plot gets thicker.

In 1967, George de Mohrenschildt discovered another version of 133-A in his possessions

after he moved back to America from Haiti. De Mohrenschildt did not know where the
photograph came from, and suspected it was planted there to further frame Oswald. The
strange thing about de Mohrenschildt's photo is that it is a clearer picture than the original
133-A, and views area outside the frame of the original 133-A. There is wide-ranging
speculation about that situation. How did de Mohrenschildt come to possess a higher quality
photo than the original, and how was it developed? Those questions bring up issues of
authenticity not easily answered.

To further add to the controversy, another backyard photograph was discovered in 1976 in the
possession of the widow of Dallas policeman Roscoe White. That photograph is now known
as 133-C. One speculation is that White pocketed the photograph when the other two were
found in Ms. Paine's garage. If that is the case, he did not keep the photograph to himself.
The position of Oswald in 133-C is markedly different from 133-A or 133-B. In 133-C, Oswald
is holding the newspapers up in the air with his right hand, and the rifle in the air with his left.
Neither 133-A nor 133-B depict that posture. In 1964, as police were recreating the backyard
photos scenario, photos were taken using the same posture as in 133-C.

Click on image to
enlarge

The Dallas police department obviously knew about 133-C in 1964. The very origin of the
photos is in question. What about the camera that took them? The camera allegedly used to
take the photographs was an Imperial Reflex camera. How was that camera found? On the
day of the assassination, when the photos were not yet “discovered,” the police seized plenty
of photographic equipment. The Dallas police discovered a miniature Minox camera, the kind
that spies used. It is about the size of a large cigarette lighter. Oswald the starving commie
certainly could not afford one of those. Even stranger was the serial number the Dallas police
recorded off of that camera: serial # 27,259. Years later, Minox reported that the serial
numbers of their cameras sold during 1963 were above 135,000. Oswald apparently had
some vintage spy equipment. The FBI tried to get the Dallas police to restate their original
report to record seizing a Minox light meter, not a camera. The Dallas police refused to
reclassify the camera, and it disappeared during the FBI investigation. The FBI later listed it as
a light meter. Gerald Posner claims to have solved that mystery. He says he interviewed Ruth
Paine's husband Michael, who said it was his camera, one he had since the 1950's.[21]

That spy camera makes the mystery of the Imperial Reflex camera even more puzzling.
Michael Paine did classified work for Bell Helicopter, which might explain his "spy" camera. It
might be innocent, but it is one more odd connection with the intelligence community, where a
woman married to a man who did classified work for the government took in Marina Oswald.
Marina and Ms. Paine met because of Ms. Paine's avid interest in the Russian language, or so
it is said. The FBI seized a number of cameras, and the Imperial Reflex camera was not taken
in the first search, nor the second, nor even a later one by the FBI, when they came to cart off
the rest of Oswald's possessions. The police even seized a camera that supposedly was not
Oswald's, but it was up to Oswald's brother Robert to stumble upon that Imperial Reflex
th
camera on December 8 , 1963, in that magical garage that kept spewing out evidence not
discovered in earlier searches.

That Imperial Reflex camera officially became the one that took the infamous photographs.
When Marina Oswald was first asked about the photographs, she claimed that she had never
taken any. Later she would testify that she remembered one photograph being taken. Later
her testimony was amended to say she had taken two photographs, in light of the fact that two
photographs were introduced into evidence. Today she says she took all three photographs
now known to exist. She may eventually remember more, because the original FBI inventory
lists four of them. There was supposedly a photo of Oswald holding the rifle over his head,
which his mother found and destroyed.

When asked when she took them, Marina originally said it was in the winter of 1963, nearly a
year before the assassination. However, the scene depicted in those photographs shows a
yard in bloom. Also, the newspapers Oswald held up were not published until the spring. After
more prodding of Marina and investigation by the Warren Commission, it has been determined
st
that the likeliest date for the photographs to have been taken was March 31 , 1963. That date
corresponds to shortly after Oswald mail-ordered the rifle, pistol and papers he displays in
those photos. It also corresponds to the timing of Oswald's “assassination attempt” on General
Walker on April 10th. Soon after the Walker incident, de Mohrenschildt met Oswald one last
time, and they never met again. There is an inscription on the back of the de Mohrenschildt
photo in Russian that says, "Hunter of Fascists, Ha! Ha! Ha!" The handwriting has never been
conclusively traced to either the Oswalds or the de Mohrenschildts, especially Oswald,
th
because the date written on the photo, April 5 , 1963, is written in European-style (5/IV/63),
which Oswald never did, as far as can be determined.

There are a few problems with the alleged photo date of March 31. March 31 may have been
too early in the year for the plants and trees in the photos to be in bloom. That situation might
be explained away, although I know of nobody who has. What is more problematic about the
March 31 date is that the photographs were taken in bright sunshine, but the weather records
for Dallas on that date show that it was cloudy with traces of rain all day. There are a couple
more oddities to consider before getting to the actual photo analysis. One is that when the FBI
finally received custody of the Imperial Reflex camera in February of 1964, it did not work, and
when it was first shown to Marina, she was unable to identify it as belonging to her husband,
even though she supposedly used it. The other is that the Oswald in the photos is wearing a
black shirt, black pants, and a distinctive wristwatch. After the assassination, the investigators
could not find in Oswald's possessions the black shirt, black pants, or the wristwatch, and
nobody ever remembered Oswald wearing that wristwatch. Maybe they should have looked in
the garage!

While performing the research for producing this web site, I had to delve into many
controversial areas. The only way to resolve the issues to my satisfaction was to try ignoring
what all sides had to say, and evaluate the primary evidence for myself, and try to become my
own expert. For a “one-man-show,” such a task is nearly impossible, so I have often relied on
secondary evidence, but I also looked at the broad spectrum of secondary evidence (while
correlating primary to secondary evidence when I could, to get a feeling for how reliable certain
secondary evidence might be), and tried digesting all the available evidence into something
coherent. The JFK issue was no exception.

Jack White deserves credit for his analysis of the backyard photos. White began his
investigation with some expertise in photography, and devoted years to analyzing the backyard
photos. The reason he did so was two-fold. The main one was that Oswald himself said the
backyard photos were faked, with his head pasted onto somebody else’s body. The other was
that White asked for and was given advice on how to pursue the JFK evidence, and was told to
become expert on just one piece of it, and focus his attention there. White did so, and a fair bit
of the evidence produced in this essay relied in some measure on what he discovered. White
deserves credit for the work he performed. However, White’s analysis of the backyard
photographs is not wholly reliable, because of his limitations as a photographic expert.
Specifically, he has no training or expertise in the field of photogrammetrics, and all of his
photogrammetric analysis is suspect.

For weeks I watched White post his analyses of Apollo lunar photographs to a JFK forum, to
make the case that the moon landings were faked. None of his photo analysis stood up to the
slightest scrutiny. To be fair, I have never seen any photo analysis of “faked” Apollo footage
that has ever stood up to scrutiny, as far is it proving that the moon landings were faked, and
White proved himself badly out of his element in analyzing the Apollo images. Recently, White
tried proving that the Zapruder film was faked, and one of his central analyses, which David
Mantik wrote produced “robust” data, has failed to impress upon scrutiny.[22]

So, White’s work has its limitations. Proving his photographic analyses wanting, however,
does not prove the case that the backyard photographs are genuine. Albert Einstein said that
he had little respect for somebody who looked for the weakest spot of a board, and repeatedly
drilled holes through it. White’s “photogrammetric” analyses are the weakest parts of his work,
and should be taken as such. White’s critics have rarely strayed beyond his lack of
photogrammetric expertise in critiquing his work. Even amateurs can stumble forward, as I did
when discovering Neil Armstrong’s leap back to the Apollo 11 LM. When a musician felt that
he found evidence that disproved the acoustic evidence of the House Select Committee on
Assassinations (HSCA), which was the linchpin in its “conspiracy” finding, the “lone gunman”
theorists fell over themselves congratulating him on his find. Amateurs have made many of
science’s breakthroughs.

Evidence can theoretically stand on its own, no matter who produces it. That is the ideal of the
scientific method. The following analysis will focus on the evidence that most strongly argues
for fakery in the backyard photos, and will also demonstrate that whatever White’s limitations
are, the official investigators for the U.S. government performed incredibly flawed, if not
intentionally flawed, analysis, which brings up the suspicion of conscious fraud.

After looking long and hard at the evidence, I think that the most impressive evidence, as far as
photographic fakery in the backyard photos is concerned, exists in four areas:

1. The anomaly of Oswald’s chin;

2. The nearly identical position of the camera in the photos;

3. The shadow anomalies;

4. The anomalies relating to Oswald’s arms and hands, and the rifle and leftist newspapers
he is holding, including some shadow anomalies;

Jack White adduced other evidence, such as Oswald’s strange posture in 133-A and evidence
of retouching. While the other evidence may provide supporting evidence of fakery, the lines of
evidence listed above seem the most impressive, and are also areas where the official
explanations sometimes dealt with the evidence in an unsatisfactory manner.
In 1994, Michael T. Griffith, one of the most prominent independent JFK investigators, spent
three hours interviewing photographic expert Brian Mee, while examining the evidence. Griffith
consulted several other specialists in the field, and their judgments concurred with Mee’s and
have influenced this essay. Mee had expertise in exactly the areas that concern the evidence
discussed below.

Before beginning this analysis, I will present my opinion of how the photos were probably
faked, if they were faked. They were probably faked just as Oswald said, by pasting his head
onto somebody else’s body. Also, there are enough strange anomalies with his hands, arms,
and the rifle and newspaper he holds, that they may indeed be “special” effects that were also
pasted into the picture (or altered), to further incriminate Oswald. The photos in evidence are
probably at least one generation removed from the original composite photos, with each
succeeding generation having degraded clarity, as with any analog copying process.

A legitimate question, in light of Gary Wean’s tale and the notion that they were trying to
fabricate Oswald’s violent reputation, is this: why would they feel the need to falsify the
backyard photographs, especially when Oswald was playing along with the game? I have long
pondered that question, and I am not sure what the answer might be. Claiming that the
backyard photos are genuine would eliminate that seeming contradiction, but for Oswald to call
them fakes, and promise that he would be able to prove that they were, is significant. Also,
there are so many inconsistencies in how the photographs made their way into the evidence,
and conflicting evidence surrounding the photos themselves (such as 03/31/63 being a cloudy
day, or how none of them were “discovered” when they should have been, with the 133-C
photo’s travels casting grave doubts on the Dallas PD’s investigative effort), that their
authenticity must be seriously questioned. It is quite possible that the rifle Oswald ordered is
not the one found in the book depository, and may not even be the one in the photographs.
Perhaps Oswald had seen the forged photographs months earlier, and knew they had been
forged for some reason. There are suspicions that there was an Oswald double, and his trail
to Mexico City and Cuba may have been forged. The backyard photos may have been part of
an entire body of evidence that was being used to fabricate Oswald’s “violent” tendencies and
communist sympathies. There are many scenarios that could have played out, when Hunt’s
little plot and the plot-within-a-plot are considered. I acknowledge that faking the backyard
photographs can seem initially inconsistent with fabricating Oswald’s violent image, but only
those who know the whole story know for sure, if anybody does, and any of them are still
alive.

If Oswald’s head was pasted on somebody else’s body, it is legitimate to search for where that
might be, and the area that leaps out to even casual observers is Oswald’s chin. There are
several pieces of impressive evidence relating to his chin and photographic fakery. The two
most impressive pieces of evidence are the shape of his chin and a line that crosses it, from
one edge of his neck to the other, looking exactly like a crop line, exactly where one might be
expected.

If Gary Wean’s tale is in any way true, nothing in the federal government’s files about Oswald
is above suspicion, and with the “double” speculations about him, the photographic evidence of
Oswald’s younger days must be viewed with suspicion. In Jack White’s second video about
the backyard photographs, he presents several photos of Oswald from the government-
produced evidence, and made the case that several photos appear to be composites. I have
not seen anybody effectively dispute White’s analysis in that matter. What I doubt can be
effectively disputed, however, are the mug shots of the man who was captured the day of the
assassination, and who died in police custody. Below are comparisons of Oswald’s chin from
his mug shots, compared with backyard photo 133-A, and also a man with a square chin is on
the right hand side of the below image.

Click on image to enlarge

Oswald transformed from a square-chinned guy in the backyard photos, to a pointy-chinned

guy. How? The man with the square chin on the right is Roscoe White, who supposedly stole
the 133-C picture. The square chin was a point of contention in the HSCA hearings, with
HSCA expert Calvin McCamy trying to convince the HSCA panel that Oswald’s chin was
square in earlier photographs. Congressman Fithian was unimpressed with McCamy’s
attempts to give Oswald a square chin, and said,

“I did not visually at least identify any other chin that was even approximately as square as the
one in the backyard photograph, from all of the pictures that you put up."

McCamy told the HSCA panel that Oswald’s square chin was an illusion, and that a trick of the
light, as it was coming almost directly from above, hid his pointy chin. He was not able to
provide even one photo of Oswald to persuasively support his point.

McCamy’s performance on the square chin issue was dubious. What was convincing,
however, was the HSCA experts’ “Penrose” study, although it was not convincing in the way it
should have been. The Penrose study compared several photos of Oswald to the backyard
photographs, to determine if the man in the backyard was indeed Oswald. The Penrose
method measured and compared the dimensions of Oswald’s face to various alleged
photographs of him. The Penrose study concluded that the backyard photographs were
genuine depictions of Oswald. The data presented for the Penrose study tells the full tale. For
three critical parts of Oswald’s head in the backyard photos, the committee omitted the data.
Most importantly, they omitted the data regarding Oswald’s chin. That is extremely suspicious,
as the chin was the primary area of contention. At best, such “editing” of the data invalidates
the Penrose study. At worst, it brings up the suspicion of fraud. I have not seen anybody even
provide a lame excuse.

Lying by omission is by far the most common method of lying. I am a professional in the
creation, manipulation and presentation of numerical data. The HSCA experts appeared to
have eliminated the data that did not conform to their foregone conclusion. In science, such a
method is known as “rigging the data.” In the world of accounting, it is known as fraud (as with
Enron and friends). Of all the many criticisms I have seen of Jack White’s work over the years,
by all manner of conspiracy debunkers, I have never seen one “lone gunman” theorist deal
with that issue, where the HSCA did something that seemed fraudulent.

Also in the images above, note the difference between where the neck, head and bottom of the
right ear meet. The man in the backyard apparently had a larger neck than the man who died
in Dallas PD custody (as did Roscoe White).

In 133-A, a line can be seen exactly where a forger might have pasted Oswald’s face onto
somebody else’s body. The below image shows approximately where the line is.

Click on image to enlarge

How did McCamy explain the apparent crop line? He said that it was a water spot. Michael
Griffith has yet to meet a photographic expert who has seen a water spot run in a straight line.
Spots are just that; spots. They are circular in nature. Mee said during the Griffith interview,

“One thing is the sheer coincidence that this line just happens to fall in the chin area; that this
one edge of this one particular water spot is supposed to have left deposits in such a way as to
form a line that coincidentally starts at one side of the neck, crosses the chin, and then ends at
the other side - right where Oswald's head could have been attached to the body. I mean, this
would be a good place to join a head to a body in a composite, in the chin area, and here we
have a line in that region, and it's supposed to be a water spot.”

What are the odds that perhaps the only water spot that ever ran in a straight line happened to
occur right where one would expect a crop line that forged a chin (that was obviously not
Oswald’s) onto his face? How far do we want to stretch coincidence?

The other anomaly that is extremely difficult to explain away, and Jack White is probably on the
right track with his work, is that the backyard photos were all taken with the camera in virtually
the same position. Marina Oswald was one of history’s most fickle witnesses. The way she
was repeatedly prodded to give the Warren Commission testimony about the backyard photos,
and had to keep amending it, as more photos cropped up as evidence or other evidence
contradicted it, does not inspire much confidence in her rendition of the facts. The Warren
Commission and others probably manipulated her. Many years after the assassination, she
publicly stated that she believed her husband had been framed. However, Marina had virtually
no experience with taking pictures, and when she described how she took the backyard
photos, it is reasonable to accept her account. According to Marina, Lee Harvey brought her
into their backyard, and had her take the pictures. He advanced the film and had her take a
picture. Then he walked over, took the camera from her, advanced the film and handed her
the camera back. Then she took another picture, until all four photos had been taken.

The background in the backyard photos is virtually unchanged from image to image. In order
for that to be the case, Marina Oswald probably could not have even moved her feet, or
changed where she held the camera. It is a highly unlikely scenario, given how Marina said
the photo session was performed. The HSCA experts said there were minor differences in the
camera’s perspective, which could account for the camera moving between pictures.
However, the apparent differences in perspective were so small that the may well have been
done on a tripod. Jack White performed experiments with “keystoning,” where the photo was
slightly tilted and then photographed, which appeared to cause the slight variations. White
says he was able to exactly align the backgrounds by that technique. I would not accept
White’s findings until I saw them independently reproduced, but Mee said the concept can
easily explain the slight variances, particularly if they are the result of multigenerational
copying. In copying 133-A from one generation to another, the slightest change in the planar
alignment of the copying camera and photo can produce the differences that can be seen in
the backgrounds between 133-A, B and C. I would like to see some quality independent
analysis of such a theory before completely endorsing it, but at this time, I have to lean toward
the tripod method of taking the images, with slight differences in the backgrounds due to slight
planar and lateral differences in making the multigenerational copies.

By examining the 133-A and 133-B photographs above, it is evident that in 133-A Oswald’s
head is virtually perpendicular to the ground. In 133-B, Oswald’s head is significantly tilted to
his left. In both images, the shadow below his nose falls almost exactly at the midpoint of his
upper lips (see the chin close-up above to see where that shadow hits his lips). Because of
the tilt of his head in 133-B, the nose shadow should not have hit his lip in the same place.
McCamy produced photographs of a mannequin at the HSCA hearings to explain this
discrepancy. He provided a novel explanation, where the head twisted and tilted, to keep the
shadow hitting the same spot on his lip. The HSCA panel was skeptical of McCamy’s
explanation, and when the mannequin achieved the posture where the shadow hit the same
part of the lip, it was no longer looking at the camera. Once again, McCamy invoked a
fortuitous set of improbable circumstances to explain away an anomaly that suggested
photographic fakery. Because the mannequin no longer looked into the camera when the
desired shadow was achieved, such an analysis cannot be accepted as explaining the
anomaly. What appears more likely is that the same head was pasted onto the different
pictures, but the forgery was not sophisticated enough to account for different head angles.

One area of evidence deals with photogrammetrics, and Jack White made the case that the
shadows on his body did not fall in the same line as the shadows on his face, for further
evidence of fakery. The HSCA investigators performed a sophisticated analysis where they
drew lines from the places on Oswald’s body that cast the shadow to where the shadow hit the
ground. They performed what they called a “vanishing point” analysis, where the lines all
converged on the source of light, the sun. The HSCA panel was also a bit skeptical of the
vanishing point analysis, as the lines appeared to converge only slight past Oswald’s head, not
at the distant sun. I performed my own crude analysis of the shadows on his face and ground,
and from what I could see, the facial and body shadows were not very far from being parallel,
not far enough for my crude analysis to catch anything impressive. One area of speculation
has been the shadow cast by Oswald’s body in 133-A, versus his nose. In that matter, I have
to tentatively conclude that the McCamy and friends may be right, or at least the conspiracy
investigators have to do their photogrammetric work better. Contrary to Jack White’s analysis,
the shadow cast by his nose is not vertical, but slightly tilted to Oswald’s left (think of minute
hand of a clock pointing to a minute or two after the hour). When I shined a flashlight on my
face from approximately the sun angle in the photos, I was able to reproduce the shadow
“anomaly,” where the left side of Oswald’s neck was lit, while the left side of his neck was in
shadow. White’s analysis is not convincing on that matter. At this time, I have to lean toward
the HSCA’s analysis regarding the shadows running parallel in their vanishing point analysis,
while their explanation with the mannequin is more of their strained logic. The independent
investigators will have to do a better job of analyzing those face/body shadow variations if they
want to present a convincing case.

The apparent falling off to the right of Oswald’s body shadow in 133-A is partly an illusion
caused by his bizarre posture. White thinks Oswald is standing to the right of his center of
gravity, which should not be possible. However, still photos catch people who are never quite
still, and Oswald could have been shifting his weight as the photo was taken, producing the
effect. However, his strange stance, where his right leg is strangely bent inward, contributes to
the illusion that the shadow cast by his body falls to his right. It does fall to his right, but not
nearly as far as it appears, because of the strange position of his right leg. If you draw lines
from his shadow on the ground to the parts of his body that cast them (in photo 133-A), they
are nearly parallel to the shadow cast by his nose. Not quite, but close enough in my crude
analysis to convince me that most of discrepancy, if not all of it, is caused by his strange
posture.

All of Jack White’s attempts to impute measured distances onto parts of the picture were
dismissed by the HSCA (and all of Jack’s many critics) because of his limitations as a
photogrammetric analyst. So, has anybody pursued what Jack attempted, to reproduce the
scene and use sophisticated photogrammetric analysis, to determine what the real height of
the man in the photos was, or how long his rifle was? If anybody has done it, I have not heard
of it.

I think the evidence is persuasive, however, that from the chin up it is Oswald, and from the
chin down it is somebody else. Whose chin might that be? Jack White investigated the
Roscoe White connection. Roscoe White was on the same ship to Japan as Oswald during
their Marine days. They both may have worked for military intelligence. White began at the
Dallas Police Department not long before the JFK assassination. A generation after Roscoe
White’s death, his son claimed to find his father’s diary, where Roscoe admitted he was one of
the Dealey Plaza shooters. Soon after the son publicly announced the existence of his father’s
diary, he said his home was burglarized, and the diary taken. The conspiracy debunkers
mainly replied with “how convenient,” and have largely dismissed the son’s testimony.
However, the 133-C photo had been taken from White’s widow in a robbery (other accounts
say that con men obtained them from White’s widow), and was seized by the FBI. That was
how it made its way into the evidence.[23] White’s widow worked for Jack Ruby shortly before
the JFK assassination.[24]

There are other correspondences between Roscoe White and the figure in the backyard
photos. He had a similar posture to the “Oswald” in the backyard photos.

Click on image to enlarge

The 133-A De Mohrenschildt photo is difficult to account for. It is a clearer image than the
“original” 133-A, and views area outside the frame of the original 133-A. Brian Mee thought
this suspicious, as do I. If the photos were forged as Mee thinks they were, the De
Mohrenschildt photo perfectly fits the evidence. If the backyard photos are fakes, the likeliest
way to do it was to take the original photos with the highest resolution cameras possible, and
perform the forgery work. Then the forged images would be photographed at least once more,
as removing the images from their original generation would hide much of the evidence of
forgery. The photographs will also lose their resolution in successive generations, and become
grainier. Also, in successive generations, the image will often get slightly cropped along the
way. The lower resolution and the graininess of the backyard photos (as Mee observed), as
well as the cropping between the De Mohrenschildt photo and the “original” 133-A, gives
compelling evidence that the “original” 133-A is a generation or more after the De
Mohrenschildt image. That is not something one would expect that Oswald did, but fits
impressively with the notion that the forgers made a slight mistake when planting evidence in
De Mohrenschildt’s belongings.

In addition, the notion that the “original” 133-A is a later generation of the forged images makes
some of the HSCA testing of dubious validity. The HSCA investigators performed tests such as
measuring the depth of the negative and grain analysis, which would have been of
questionable validity if they were generations removed from the original, altered photos.

Those are the main lines of evidence I was the most impressed with, as far as giving evidence
of forgery, and where I thought the HSCA performed questionable, if not fraudulent, work.

The last area of evidence that I found compelling, but other investigators often have not, is in
the area of his hands, arms and the newspapers and rifle he is holding. Those backyard
photos about are the only evidence linking Oswald to the murder weapon. A nitrate test on his
cheek on the day of the assassination (to determine if he fired the rifle) was negative. There
was a belated finding of his palm print on an inside part of the rifle, after it had been
dismantled, which has understandably been greeted with skepticism in the JFK “conspiracy”
community. There were no fingerprints on either the rifle or the pistol that were identified as
Oswald’s murder weapons.

Oswald had to be an idiot if he was the real assassin. Earlier in 1963, he was arrested for the
attempted murder of Edwin Walker, and he obviously would have been suspect number one if
he really shot JFK, employed in the building where the shots were fired, with a rifle he not only
bought months earlier, but used in another assassination attempt. With all those incriminating
circumstances, we are supposed to believe that he carefully wiped his fingerprints off the rifle
before he snuck out of the depository? But he also was so stupid that he had no plan of
escape, taking a bus and cab before lamely trying to hide in a theater? Far more likely is that
the “safe house” plan that Hunt devised for Oswald evaporated when JFK was really shot, and
Oswald did what he could, on his own, as the world’s most marked man.

The rest of this backyard photo section will deal with the rifle, newspapers and the hands and
arms holding them.

Oswald’s left arm, which holds the rifle, is peculiar. Below his upper arm, the only thing visible
is his hand. His entire forearm and elbow are invisible. Jack White tried reproducing the
phenomenon, but was unable to.
 Click on image to enlarge

It may be possible that the way Oswald held the rifle hid his entire forearm, but I think that
anomaly bears further scrutiny. His right hand that holds the newspapers is anomalous for
more than one reason, and one anomaly is impressive indeed. The fingers on his right hand
all appear chopped off, as if Oswald had an accident with the meat cleaver.

Click on image to enlarge

The photograph I am using is a pretty good one, from Groden’s The Killing of a President, p.
112. The chopped off look is evident in the photo above. Whatever disparaging comments the
critics may make about Jack White, one thing they cannot dispute is that Jack has about the
best quality photographs that exist to work with. On the presentation in his video, the
chopped-off look of his fingers is even more pronounced. Mee was skeptical. He thought the
reflection of light from the papers could have produced an illusion. White calls the chopped-off
fingers evidence of retouching. The other anomaly is even more impressive to me.

The shadow issue is highly contested. Oswald has a shadow below his nose, and his eyes are
completely in shadow. It appears as if the sun is at a 45-degree angle to the ground. I arrived
at that approximate angle by noting that the shadow’s length under his nose is about equal to
the distance his nose protrudes from his face. That is only an approximation, and does not
need to be more accurate for the point I am about to make.

The HSCA investigation applied plenty of professional aptitude to the backyard photos, and
McCamy made the case that the sun was coming in at such a high angle, that the bottom of
Oswald's pointy chin was in shadow, creating the illusion that Oswald had a square chin. If
one looks at the photo, McCamy's rationale uses strained logic, one the HSCA itself found
difficult to swallow, but the point is taken that the sunlight is coming from a steep angle.[25]
Oswald is holding the newspapers against his chest at a nearly perpendicular angle; his right
hand with the chopped-off fingers is holding the paper. There is something even stranger than
the ends of the fingers missing. The nose’s shadow is about the equivalent of how far it
protrudes. Using the same logic, his index finger should cast a shadow on the newspaper it is
holding, roughly equal to the height of the finger above the paper. Take a good look at the
shadow cast by his right index finger.

Click on image to enlarge

There is no shadow. That is compelling evidence that the photo is faked, which would prove
the case that Oswald was not a lone nut, if it was true. That logic is admitted to by virtually
everybody who has studied the assassination. If those are faked photos, they are
sophisticated fakes for 1963. It means that somebody went to a great deal of effort to forge the
photos, not something that “Oswald the starving commie” would have had the time, resources
or motive to do. There is also a complete lack of shadow under the bottom of Oswald's hand
and little finger.

The final issue is the murder weapon itself. The backyard photos were highly damning
because they showed Oswald posing with the murder weapon. There is compelling evidence
that at least two rifles have been in evidence as the murder weapon, and that the rifle in the
backyard photos is probably not the weapon in evidence today.

Jerry McLeer has presented evidence of two different rifles in evidence, with one cleverly
forged to look like the other. The most convincing pieces of evidence are the numerous
discrepancies between the rifle examined by the Warren Commission and the weapon that sits
in the National Archives (which the Archives will not let anybody examine). Life Magazine took
photographs of the rifle in 1983, and those images provide much of the evidence. There is
also evidence that the “murder weapon” is a vintage rifle, not something that Oswald would
have been able to mail order.

Of the many discrepancies between the two rifles, what may be the most impressive for a lay
audience are the discrepancies in the serial number, which are depicted in the image below.

Click on image to enlarge

the ad they presented was a duplicate of the ad Oswald used to purchase his rifle. The
original ad that Oswald used was readily available, which made independent investigators
scratch their heads. The reason for the Warren Commission’s use of another, later, ad than
the one Oswald used became evident. The rifle in the National Archives is a forty-inch rifle.
The rifle in the ad Oswald used to purchase his rifle was a thirty-six-inch rifle. The Commission
substituted a later ad that advertised a forty-inch rifle. That switch by the Warren Commission
to force the rifle in evidence to correspond to the ad is a strange way to perform an
investigation.

Another issue lends evidence to the notion that the rifle in the photos is not the “murder
weapon” in the National Archives. McLeer’s analysis provides the evidence, although the
images in Groden's The Killing of a President are adequate. On the rifle’s stock, about a foot
from the barrel’s end, on its underside, is a circular ring about an inch in diameter. It is used to
attach a strap. The ring is quite clear in good reproductions of the photograph. The ring is
round, and appears on the underside of the rifle stock. The Warren Commission rifle had an
oblong ring mounted to the side. The author of A Carcano Homepage theorizes that the ring is
part of the bush behind Oswald, a contention nearly impossible to take seriously. Another
explanation I have seen is that the rifle that Oswald holds is turned enough to where the
oblong ring on the far side of the Warren Commission rifle is visible, providing the illusion that it
is a circular, bottom-mounted ring strap. I am skeptical of that explanation also. The rifle
appears slightly rotated, as can be seen by looking at the riflescope, but it appears far from
being rotated onto its side, especially far enough to make the Warren Commission rifle side
ring produce the alleged illusion. The only way to know for sure is to get the “murder weapon”
and perform the reconstruction (I will not hold my breath waiting for the federal government’s
cooperation on that matter). Also, the cheap rifle strap seen in the backyard photos is
markedly at variance with the strap found on the murder weapon, a strap that appears dyed
black, as well as the rifle stock itself. It is difficult to imagine a starving commie shelling out for
a designer strap for his rifle (which appears to be designed for the rifle, dyed that same color
as the rifle’s stock), when he already had one. Here are some images of the controversial strap
ring.

Click on image to enlarge

One of the difficult-to-explain-away aspects of Oswald’s tale, particularly regarding the rifle, is
that Oswald was supposedly a starving commie. In 1962, he come up with enough money to
repay several hundred dollars in loans (including a loan from the State Department), while
making virtually no money and trying to support a wife and child. The “lone gunman”
defenders have never satisfactorily explained Oswald’s finances, particularly during the time
leading up to the assassination.[26] Oswald the starving commie and family man somehow
paid off loans and bought a rifle, while scarcely making ends meet. It is similar to the enigma
to how Private Oswald could have been a regular customer at a highly expensive Tokyo
nightclub, rubbing shoulders with the military brass (something way out of line with America’s
military caste system). One night at that club cost as much as he made in a month.

The “murder weapon” was so poorly made that government investigators had to fix the sight’s
alignment so it could hit what it shot at, and even then, the government’s best marksmen, after
numerous trials, were never able to duplicate Oswald’s alleged feat of putting two bullets into a
moving target of JFK’s size and distance, in the time the assassination took.[27] Oswald was
only a mediocre marksman in the Marines, and there is no evidence that he ever used a
bolt-action rifle before November 22, 1963.

The evidence argues persuasively in favor of the hypothesis that the photos were forged and
planted, and the camera was planted. In kind, it is nearly identical to the magic bullet’s tale.
After the bullet’s highly dubious entrance into the evidence ledgers, Arlen Specter and Gerald
Ford concocted one of the most implausible tales ever.

JFK’s autopsy photos are probably also forgeries/composites. Nearly all the medical
personnel who attended to JFK at the Parkland Hospital, where he was taken after he was
shot, testified that the back of his head was blown out. Large blowouts are exit wounds, not
entrance wounds. The back of his head being blown out is inconsistent with a bullet coming
from Oswald's rifle. The back of his head being blown out is nearly irrefutable evidence of a
shot hitting him from the front, which brings up the legendary grassy knoll gunman.

Click on image to enlarge

 In light of the backyard photos, altering or forging the JFK autopsy photos (and X-rays)
would be consistent with how the entire affair has been manipulated.

There may have been several shooters in Dealy Plaza that fateful day.

The Nature of the JFK Assassination Affair

I have noticed a pattern in the JFK assassination that reappears in other cover-up attempts.

1. People in power do not want the rest of humanity to obtain information that may disrupt
their power base, even if that information could benefit humanity (e.g. free energy, cancer
cures, political information) because it would encroach on their power base. Noam
Chomsky says that the current institutional ideology ranks hegemony above survival.
Another way of stating it is that the elite do not really care if they destroy life on earth, as
long as they are in charge (with survival enclaves secured for themselves, however).

2. Derailing access to this information is within the scope, motivation and resources of the
power elite (e.g. the energy oligarchy, medical establishment and U.S. government).

3. There are often agent provocateurs involved in those obfuscations – an agent who
develops fake credentials to allow him/her to infiltrate the ranks of researchers who
attempt to uncover the truth of any suspected conspiracy, or propose solutions to the big
problems.

4. The structural composition of the suppression includes prosecutors whose careers are
measured by their “kill ratio.” The actual innocence of guilt of those prosecuted makes
no difference to those people, who also employ others who are just “following orders.”
So people who are just doing their jobs largely inflict the damage (the same dynamic is
seen in the cancer racket, where approved “treatments” kill off the patients, while the real
cures are suppressed).

5. Public apathy and lack of integrity of those trying to uncover the truth is by far the most
important aspect of these situations. For example, many people suppose that because
we do not have free energy, that it does not exist, thereby ignoring the possibility that
these resources have been suppressed. Absence of evidence is not necessarily
evidence of absence. Diogenes’ quest for the honest man would be as fruitless today as
it was in ancient Greece.

Independent investigators of the JFK assassination often discuss how unhelpful the CIA and
FBI have been. The CIA essentially works for the Fortune 500, just as the American President
does. They call themselves an intelligence agency, but their “intelligence” is usually
disinformation designed to fool the American public. Covert action is their main function, and it
has contributed to the death and misery of countless millions of people. The FBI has been
liberally used to derail social movements in the United States. Outright murder of activists for
native rights, black rights and the like has been merely days at the office for the FBI.[28]
“Fighting crime” has been one of their minor functions. Those organizations are little different
than the Soviet Union’s KGB, except that America’s spooks have caused far more death and
destruction than the KGB could have ever aspired to. It is well known that many in the
American “intelligence community” were very happy when JFK was killed. On that day, in my
father’s office in the Department of Defense, one man walked down the halls, shouting his
approval of Kennedy’s murder, saying that JFK got what comes to all “tyrants.”

What is obvious when researching the JFK assassination is that at least some theorists and
investigators are provocateurs. A classic CIA disinformation ploy is to flood a certain subject
with information, some of it true, and some or most of it fabrication. If anybody tries
investigating the information, they will find so much false information that it taints whatever
might be true. There are an incredible number of JFK assassination theories. One is that
Kennedy was hit accidentally by a Secret Service man riding in the car behind him, whose gun
accidentally discharged when Kennedy was under fire, giving him his fatal headshot. There is
a bizarre theory that there was more than one gunman, but they coincidentally tried to kill
Kennedy at the same instant (the Washington Post cooked that one up). That one invokes
odds of trillions-to-one. There are even stranger theories than those. Prominent people, such
as mainstream journalists, have concocted some of them. They were probably creating their
surreal theories under the influence of the CIA or other spook organization. The CIA has
operatives in virtually every major media organization. The circus atmosphere of strange
theories has served to discredit all assassination theories besides the official “lone nut” one,
and sincere researchers are nearly defeated before they begin.

Again, most importantly, what has hurt the independent assassination researchers the most
has probably been the behavior of the researchers themselves. Those who independently
spend years of their lives investigating the assassination have a trust fund or other source of
passive income, are doing it in their spare time, or try to sell the results of their labors. Not too
many people have the trust fund option. Also, those who are independently wealthy or have
inherited wealth almost always obtained it through the workings of the system, and
consequently are rarely going to have the inclination to challenge that system. I have never
received a dime of compensation for this work, and have given up hundreds of thousands of
dollars of lost income to pursue it, and not many people can do that.

If people put their JFK research out there with their name on it, the provocateurs and others
generally take the tactic of discrediting them, and they are instead put into the position of
defending themselves, and the evidence they have produced is not considered. It is a classic
misdirection tactic. That phenomenon is not limited to investigating conspiracies. My critics do
not want to discuss the merits of my propositions, such as whether we are engaging in
genocide in Iraq to control Middle East oil, or that we are putting poison in our water supply
and calling it medicine. Instead, they attack me for my style, call me names, and otherwise
totally avoid the substance of my work.

I have looked into many areas like the JFK assassination, looking at the primary evidence for
myself. I also rely on the work of historians and investigators whose work I have come to
respect, through long investigation of their work, such as Noam Chomsky, Edward Herman,
David Stannard, Carl Sauer and Rodney Stich, to name a few.

The fact that provocateurs have stirred up plenty of trouble, that independent JFK researchers
have not always been pillars of virtue, that they often attack each other, that they become too
attached to their theories, should not cloud the question of whether JFK was murdered by a
conspiracy. Proving a researcher’s theory wrong does not mean that JFK was not murdered
by a conspiracy. The evidence can speak for itself, in those backyard photos.

The JFK assassination brings up extremely uncomfortable issues for Americans. If JFK was
killed by a backfired covert operation (as Gary’s story says), and the government acted to
cover it up, what kind of government does America really have? Would it really be much more
legitimate than ancient Rome’s? I have found that nearly everybody who defends the lone
gunman theory of the JFK assassination is also of a white bread political persuasion, with
ideas that rarely stray from what officialdom says is so. Defending the lone gunman theory
appears in large measure to be an attempt to defend the legitimacy of the U.S. government.
Why? I think the cognitive dissonance dynamic explains much of it.

If Gary’s story is true, a lot more than JFK’s death was initiated by that backfired plot to frame
Castro. The successful cover-up of JFK’s murder appeared to embolden the intelligence
community. The rash of assassinations and attempts after JFK, leading clear to the attempt on
Ronald Reagan, all have suspicious connections to the U.S. intelligence community, with a
“lone nut” scapegoat served up each time. Hunt eventually got caught with his hand in the
cookie jar with the Watergate burglary, which may have far more sinister connotations than just
some bumbling idiots trying to derail the Democratic challengers to Nixon. This essay will
further deal with those issues of further assassinations and other dirty tricks.

Why Are There So Many Conspiracy Theories Today?

While investigating conspiracies and cover-ups, I wondered if this “conspiracy mania” was
happening in America fifty years ago. The push to fluoridate our water supplies began more
than fifty years ago. Much of it was a “structural” conspiracy. Scientists working for fluoride
polluters would naturally, if largely unconsciously, massage the data to minimize the harm that
fluoride caused, and amazingly, produced data showing that fluoride was good for people.
Recently, declassified documents show the U.S. government covering up fluoride poisoning,
because fluorine was used in the Manhattan Project extensively, and there were industrial
fluoride accidents that harmed many people. Even though it turns out that fluoridation luminary
Harold Hodge was secretly working to cover-up fluoride damage due to industrial accidents,
and was doing secret research on the fluoride ion's effect on the human central nervous
system, a lot of it was just doing his job and obeying the rules of “national security.”

I once had exchanges with a college kid who thought that the political “realists” understood the
global situation much better than “radicals” such as Chomsky. After reading some “realist”
literature, I doubt it. Scholarship that assumes away economic factors is not very realistic.[29]
The kid said that the reason why only a few CIA employees have ever written books critical of
the CIA is that almost all CIA employees believe that their careers serve their nation. My
response was two-fold. One is that serving their nation obviously did not mean serving the
interests of those in the nations the CIA helped rape. The other point is that the vast majority
of CIA personnel will believe they are doing “good work” no matter how much their eyes tell
them otherwise. People will always see themselves as “good guys,” no matter what they are
doing. That goes for death camp Nazis killing Jewish children, American “pioneers” killing
Native American children, American soldiers bombing Iraq, Vietnam, Yugoslavia, and doctors
whose cancer treatments kill their patients.
Today, conspiracy theories abound in the media and public awareness. Why? I think it is
mainly because of the many shocks the American psyche has endured during the past forty
years.

JFK’s assassination marked the beginning of the end of innocence for many Americans. There
were definitely dark activities taking place before that, but the American people were largely in
denial about them. After the JFK assassination, America had the Vietnam War, Watergate, the
scandals of the Reagan-Bush years (Iran-Contra and Savings and Loan scandals), and
America's confidence in its institutions and leaders cannot sink much lower.

There is a strange dichotomy, however. On one hand, people are slowly realizing that they are
continually lied to. Yet, they are selective in the lies they believe or disbelieve. It may be
related to the size of the lies. People will believe the lies that serve their interests, while
maintaining a general attitude that they are being lied to. They inconsistently assess the
dishonesty in their world, and the powerful fully encourage such inconsistency. For instance,
the two biggest “scandals” in the media during the 1990s were the O.J. Simpson murder trial
and Bill Clinton’s “zippergate” scandal with Monica Lewinsky. The Savings and Loan scandal
will cost American taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars, and it is already disappearing into
the Memory Hole. Whether O.J. Simpson committed murder or Bill Clinton really had sex with
Monica Lewinsky had virtually no bearing on the average American’s life. Yet, those were the
big media “scandals” of the 1990s. As Chomsky has said, one of the main purposes of the
mainstream media is distracting people from what is really happening. Our murderous oil
policies can kill off millions of Iraqi citizens, mainly children, and it barely makes the news or
lodges in the public awareness, while O.J. and Clinton’s cigar make headline news. It is not
entirely the media’s fault. They are tending the herd, but the herd also desires the tending.

In the end, people suspect something is awry, and the great increase in conspiracy theories is
evidence of it. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross performed the seminal research on the psychological
aspects of death and dying in the West. She named five stages of the process. They are:
denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. This process has been generalized to
apply to any grieving process, and can apply to most things people do not want to face. In
1962, about 85% of Americans had “great faith” in society’s institutions, such as the
government, corporations, and churches. Today, only about ten percent of Americans have
that “great faith” anymore. What has replaced it is anger, the process’ next stage. Acceptance
(some may think they are in acceptance, but they instead have apathetic feelings of
powerlessness; it is not the same thing), and transcendence appear to be a long way off, but
Mother Earth cannot wait that long. Bargaining and depression are stages that humanity has
largely not experienced yet. As Americans have been staying in denial, cognitive dissonance
has become more evident, particularly after the World Trade Center attacks of September
2001.

The long prophesied “earth changes,” which are happening today, as with global warming, is
also going to accelerate the process. Will we wake up quickly enough to prevent our demise
by our own hand? Conspiracy theories seem to be incomplete attempts to understand what is
happening. What such a mentality seeks is to seemingly relieve us of our responsibility for
what is happening, making us the victims of powerful forces, but the only “power” those forces
have is what we gave them. Until we learn to accept our responsibility, the fascination with
conspiracies will be one more way that we avoid taking responsibility for our lives.
Investigating conspiracies or cover-ups can be dangerous business, however.
 The Dangers of Investigating Conspiracies and Cover-ups
With our steeply hierarchical political, economic and social systems, not too many people at
the top have to be “in on it” to make conspiratorial designs a reality. The conspiratorial and
structural (or conscious and unconscious) perspectives of the situations are important in
understanding what is happening. Neither one, by itself, can fully explain the phenomenon.

Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman can write at length about the structural aspects of
America’s system, and how its media, for instance, can serve up an inverted view of reality,
and they will suffer no harm. For instance, the documentary on Chomsky's life and career,
titled Manufacturing Consent, is the most popular documentary in Canadian history.
Chomsky's thesis is virtually proven by the reception that it has received in United States. To
my knowledge, no American television station has ever played it, except for a small alternative
station.

It is argued, and it is partly true, that Chomsky and Herman have not had their careers ruined,
or been thrown in jail, or died mysteriously, because they are prominent academics in their own
right, Chomsky arguably being the world’s most prominent academic during the past fifty
years. However, the most important reason they are still alive is probably because they are not
unmasking conspirators. That is when the work can get dangerous.

Structural analysis is generally involved with studying documentation. Conspiracies, by their

very nature, do not leave paper trails. Consequently, the “solid” evidence is often patchy, and
can lead to various interpretations. Also, because of the spotty nature of the “hard” evidence,
people can construct conspiracy theories from rather flimsy evidence, where there may have
been no conspiracy. That is the nature of the beast. All too often, people dismiss any and all
conspiracy theories because the evidence is not ironclad. Also, “conspiracy” has become a
code word for “lunatic fringe.” Deductive logic’s conclusions are only as valid as its
assumptions. Inductive logic begins with the factual information available, and is also valid
reasoning.

Here are examples of the dangers of investigating conspiracies. When Gary Wean waged a
legal battle against the gangsters who run Ventura County, who are the judges and their
cronies, they tried murdering him in his front yard. Gary made a legal motion that obstructed
the sale of bonds used to build the County Center (where Dennis was jailed), swindling the
taxpayers out of many millions of dollars. Building the County Center was part of a plan to
make a killing in real estate and other raids of the public coffers. The weekend before Gary's
lawsuit delayed the issuance of revenue bonds, he came home one Saturday night to see a
strange car parked near his house. Gary had been a policeman for many years, and his
instincts saved his life. The assassin was sneaking into his yard in the twilight, and Gary
grabbed his pistol from his car and hid behind a tree. The assassin fired and blew off a tree
limb next to Gary's head. Gary returned fire as their car sped away. If they had killed Gary, his
lawsuit would have been dismissed on Monday morning, and the revenue bonds would have
sold without a hitch.[30] That is one way to deal with gadflies like Gary.

Chronicling mysterious drownings, mysterious plane crashes, a bloody murder of a lawyer and
his wife in their bed a few miles from where I was raised, and other dark events, such as the
county judges controlling the local drug trade, Gary's book makes for scary reading; but
murders are the extreme acts. Bribes, framing people for crimes and scandals, media smears
and Kangaroo Court were the more common modus operandi of the conspiracies.

Whereas Gary Wean is speculative in his work at times, Rodney Stich is a conservative writer.
As with Gary, Stich did not become involved because he loved diving into nasty messes, but
his job led him to the heart of darkness. Stich was a Federal Aviation Administration (FAA)
investigator during the 1960s, and was assigned to investigate several fatal crashes of United
Airlines jets. During the course of his investigation, he stumbled into FAA corruption and
complicity with United Airlines in covering up their negligence that led to the disasters. Worse
than the negligence he discovered was the corruption that covered it up. He wrote Unfriendly
Skies, and went on the radio and TV talk show circuit to expose what was happening. It won
him few friends in the aviation establishment.

Most people in Stich's shoes keep their head down, stay quiet and keep punching the clock. A
case in point is my Justice Department friend who investigated the death threat made by an
automobile company to a man who invented a 100-MPG carburetor. The oil companies paid
the quiet money of $50 million to suppress the invention. My friend was no hero. He saw what
happened and realized how the game was played. He kept his head down and later
enlightened me with the story. He would not risk his neck by making his discovery public.

Stich's investigations took him deeper and deeper, and his Defrauding America shows how far
he descended into the darkness. Defrauding America is about the most frightening book an
American can read. In conservative style with little speculation, Stich chronicles theft after theft
of the public's money by a series of related scams by the rich and ruthless. Defrauding
America even chronicles a huge bribe that one of my relatives took, and from what I know of
the person, Stich's revelation does not surprise me.

Stich investigated the black world of CIA drug running, the criminal aspects of the S&L scandal,
Iran-Contra, October Surprise, etc., and the hard-to-believe corruption in the federal
government, with federal judges part of the program, eagerly taking their cut (they are
lawyers). With a prominent federal court judge in California whom Gary knows was a protégé
of Mick Cohen, because he regularly saw them together when the judge was a young lawyer,
the overlap in Stich's and Gary's stories are many.

Defrauding America's cover says it makes the "Godfather Saga Pale by Comparison." It does.
One chapter is titled "Silencing Whistleblowers." In that chapter, Stich chronicles what
establishment gangsters do to people who speak up. Murdering them is more common than is
comfortable for me, yet more common is an array of kangaroo court tactics and other tricks.
Stich notes that the pattern of murder accelerated during the 1990s, as the crimes escalated.
No saints have ever been American presidents. The Clinton Body Count, where many close to
him have died suddenly and/or mysteriously, is well known. If most of them were liquidated, it
is standard American politics. Defrauding America was published in 1994, and the worst
scandals happened during the Reagan-Bush years. Defrauding America, Russell Bowen’s
The Immaculate Deception, Bo Gritz' Called to Serve and Pete Brewton’s The Mafia, CIA and
George Bush corroborate that information.

Before reading Defrauding America, I was aware of many of those whistleblowers' fates, and
Stich's book told me of dozens more. Stich mentions Danny Casolaro, who was an
investigative reporter who tried breaking the story on what he called "The Octopus." The
Octopus was a pattern of scandals that seemed related, including the October Surprise. For
those not familiar with October Surprise, it relates to Ronald Reagan's presidential campaign in
1980. The Iranians released their hostages the day Reagan was inaugurated.

Casolaro’s Octopus was an alleged connection between the October Surprise, Iran-Contra,
BCCI, Inslaw and other scandals. In early August of 1991, Casolaro felt that he had nearly
solved the puzzle, and told his friends and family that he had nearly attained the big payoff to
his investigations.

Just as he reached the brink, he began receiving anonymous threats, so ominous that
Casolaro told his brother, a physician, "I have been getting some threatening phone calls. If
anything happens to me, don't believe it was accidental." A week later, Casolaro was on his
life's most important trip, going to Martinsburg, West Virginia seeking his puzzle's final pieces.
th
On August 10 , while Casolaro was in Martinsburg, a week after he told his brother to not
accept "accidental" explanations of anything happening to him, the housekeeper at the
Casolaro home picked up the ringing phone to hear, "You're dead, you bastard." The
anonymous caller quickly hung up. On that same day, Danny Casolaro lay dying in a bathtub
at the Sheraton Hotel in Martinsburg.

In life, Casolaro was squeamish, but the body in the bathtub had apparently hacked its wrists
so forcefully that a tendon was severed. There was a suicide note, asking for forgiveness. His
friends and family thought him unlikely to kill himself, especially his brother, who received
Danny's warning the week before. Casolaro was outgoing and boyishly exuberant about life.
The Martinsburg authorities did not contact his family the day Danny died. Instead they quickly
and illegally had his body embalmed, something that made a valid autopsy (to answer
questions such as, "had he been drugged?") impossible. The next day the Village Voice
received an anonymous call, telling them that Casolaro had died. Casolaro's family was not
notified until the day after the Village Voice received the news.

When looking into assassinations, mysterious suicides, etc., the same patterns repeat
themselves. Inexplicably, the police abandon the most basic procedures of their profession,
and cavalierly destroy or "misplace" evidence. Very strangely, a briefcase full of Casolaro's
investigative notes, which he hauled everywhere he went, especially to Martinsburg, vanished
without a trace. There was also evidence that somebody besides Casolaro was in the room
after he died, because somebody had been trying to mop up the blood with towels, as told by
the assistant housekeeper on duty at the hotel, who was on the scene before the authorities
arrived. The housekeeper told of blood smeared all over the floor, and a wad of bloody towels
lying under the sink. How strange. It was not strange enough for the local police to follow up
on, however. It was a suicide, case closed.[31]

After his family raised hell when they discovered what the West Virginia authorities had done,
there was an official "investigation," which naturally confirmed that Casolaro killed himself. In
U.S. history, very few official investigations have concluded that something might be awry with
the system. They are usually cover-ups more than they are investigations.

When the Warren Commission investigated JFK's murder, they could not deny foul play, but
decided that a "lone nut" did it. The evidence for a conspiracy surrounding the JFK
assassination is simply overwhelming, and studying debunking work such as Gerald Posner's
Case Closed makes the case for conspiracy even stronger, even ignoring what Gary Wean
knows. When the House Select Committee on Assassinations investigated the JFK
assassination, one piece of evidence caused them to decide that a conspiracy killed JFK.
Many other pieces of evidence should have also convinced them, but they settled on one.
They backpedaled as well, saying that there was a conspiracy, but they had no idea who did it.
Case closed.

Casolaro was probably silenced. He was kind of an amateur, and probably got in over his
head. Casolaro ran his ideas by an FBI man. That FBI man told a House investigative
committee, "There is cause for suspicions." Three days before Casolaro died, he told an FBI
agent that he was warned that his pursuit of the Octopus would kill him.[32]

Another incident during the 1990s can make the pattern clearer. Paul Wilcher was a lawyer
st
who deeply probed the world of CIA covert actions and conspiracies. On May 21 , 1993,
Wilcher sent a 101-page document to U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno. His letter had similar
allegations to Casolaro's "Octopus" investigation. To average Americans, Wilcher's allegations
might seem like the most extreme conspiracy theories that anybody could imagine.

There is an impressive body of evidence that the Jonestown "mass suicide" in Guyana was
anything but mass suicide. Conscientious investigators unearthed that evidence long ago, but
I have never seen the American mainstream media question the "mass suicide" Kool Aid
story. There is strong evidence that Jonestown was a slave labor camp that Jones was
running with CIA help. Jones had significant CIA ties. There were enough psychoactive drugs,
such as Thorazine, at Jonestown to have kept a city of 200,000 doped up for a year. The
coroner of Guyana, Dr. Mootoo, was on the scene quickly, and testified that almost all the dead
had injection marks on their shoulder blades, or were shot or strangled. There was no
evidence of mass suicide, but mass murder.

What appears to have happened is something that most Americans would rather not believe
could happen. Jonestown appears to have been a continuation of the CIA's MK-ULTRA mind
control experiments. The CIA told Congress that they stopped MK-ULTRA in the 1970's, but
Ralph McGehee has never once seen the CIA tell the truth to Congress. It is so bad that it is
almost guaranteed that the exact opposite of what the CIA tells Congress is true. One of the
CIA's primary tasks is lying to the American people. It appears that Jones was a CIA asset
who ran a mind control experiment at Jonestown. Jones was the boyhood friend of CIA torture
specialist Dan Mitrione, who also operated out of South America. Most of Jonestown’s
"residents" were black. The people running Jonestown were white. The "church" they ran in
the San Francisco Bay area did attract disturbed and gullible white people who wanted to join a
cult, but many Jonestown "residents" apparently were abducted off the San Francisco’s
streets, while others were lured there under false pretenses. It appears that Jonestown may
have been partially inspired by what the Nazis did in the death camps. Josef Mengele, of
Auschwitz fame, may have known Jones. Mengele may have “consulted” at Jonestown.

Whatever they were doing in Jonestown, California Congressman Leo Ryan was getting heat
from his constituents regarding their sons and daughters being spirited off to Guyana. Ryan
decided to check out Jonestown himself, and flew down there. Ryan's appearance "blew" the
operation's cover, and it had to be shut down. Ryan was murdered as he landed at
Jonestown, which is the first and only time that a U.S. Congressman has died in the line of
duty. Then they liquidated Jonestown's 900 residents. They apparently tried turning the
Jonestown inmates into automatons, and they tried getting everybody to drink the
cyanide-laced Kool Aid, but the people were not that far gone. Nearly everybody fled into the
jungle. They were chased down, murdered, and hauled back to Jonestown.

Alleged CIA-agent and embassy official Richard Dwyer was apparently there when the killing
began, and Jones himself was captured on audio tape yelling, "Get Dwyer out of here!" British
and American Special Forces troops were "conducting operations" in the vicinity, and they
rounded up and killed Jonestown's fleeing inmates. Bo Gritz knows a Special Forces operative
who was on that operation. The man was so outraged that he wrote a manuscript, titling it with
the message they radioed in when the job was done: "All the Niggers are Dead!" U.S. secrecy
laws forbade the man from publishing it, but he at least had the satisfaction of writing it.[33]

Jonestown has apparently been repopulated by inmates from Asia, and is merely one of
numerous camps like it. There apparently are other Jonestowns dotting the globe, run by the
CIA and other spook agencies. America’s tax dollars at work.

How many Americans have heard that story? Has Dan Rather talked about that one lately? A
House committee "investigated," and concluded that the CIA had nothing to do with
Jonestown. Case closed.

Wilcher heard about it, however. Jonestown was mentioned in his letter, along with the JFK,
RFK, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and John Lennon assassinations, as well as the deaths of
J. Edgar Hoover, Martha Mitchell, John Tower, Senator John Heinz, Congressman Ted Weiss,
as well as the attempts on Ronald Reagan and George Wallace. Wilcher also wrote about
October Surprise, the FBI's COINTELPRO program wiping out the Black Panthers, and so on.
Wilcher even alleged that the South Korean airliner's downing was not by the Soviet Union, but
the CIA. Is there a conspiracy theory that Wilcher left out? The major thrust of Wilcher's letter
was what happened at Waco. He also discussed the infamous Clinton Body Count. Wilcher's
belief was that unless somebody like Reno found some courage, there would not be an
America left before long.

Wilcher was snooping into the bank accounts of ex-presidents at BCCI. Janet Reno was far
from alone in hearing from him. Most of Capitol Hill was aware of Wilcher's muckraking.

Wilcher was taping and attending conferences held by famous independent White House
correspondent Sarah McClendon. In the meantime, Wilcher was in close contact with CIA
agents and his friend Rodney Stich. In early June 1993, a few weeks after he sent his letter to
Janet Reno, Wilcher stopped attending McClendon's conferences. McClendon herself became
concerned about Wilcher, and asked a woman friend of Wilcher's to ask Stich if he had heard
from him. It is known that on June 16, 1993 Wilcher talked to one of his sources, a CIA
contract agent in a federal penitentiary, and an informant of Stich's also.

A couple days before the woman called Stich, she went to Wilcher's apartment, looking for
him. Not only was Wilcher not home, but the woman also rang the adjacent apartment's
doorbell and was greeted with a recording saying that she had reached a disconnected
government number.

Wilcher’s friend called Stich on June 22, 1993, asking him what to do, and if he thought
Wilcher was alive. Stich responded that based on what he knew, it was 75% likely that Wilcher
was dead. In the meantime, McClendon, 83 at the time, was badgering the Washington D.C.
rd
police to do something about Wilcher's disappearance. On June 23 , the Washington D.C.
police finally broke into Wilcher's apartment to find his decomposing, naked corpse sitting
upright on the toilet, as if he had died there.

The apartment was crawling with nearly thirty firemen, policemen and FBI investigators. The
FBI seized all the records in Wilcher's apartment, while incredibly telling McClendon (who
rushed to the scene) that they had "no interest" in the case. The local authorities inexplicably
ruled Wilcher's death a suicide. The coroner's office refused to provide Stich with a copy of
their autopsy report. Case closed.

Stich's informants are CIA/FBI/NSA types, and they end up dead from time to time (one was
stuffed into a car trunk at an airport). I am surprised that Stich lived long enough to write
Defrauding America. They got Stich, however, which I will cover soon.

Stich discovered that Wilcher was apparently lured out of his apartment and led to Vienna,
Virginia. He was interrogated about what he knew about George Bush's, Jimmy Carter's and
former CIA head William Webster's bank accounts at BCCI. BCCI insiders had given Wilcher a
great deal of documentation. Wilcher was then fed a pizza and given a can of Pepsi. The
Pepsi can was coated with a solution of curare dissolved in DMSO. DMSO is a chemical that
carries throughout a person’s body in seconds. When I was in collegiate track, I knew people
who used it. If you put your finger in a cup of DMSO, you can taste it on your tongue in
seconds. Curare is a highly toxic poison that paralyzes the muscles, causing death from
asphyxiation. Wilcher was dead within minutes of grabbing that can of Pepsi.

Then his killers (CIA/NSA types) put his corpse into a fetal position, stuck it in a car's trunk and
drove back to his apartment. By the time they arrived, rigor mortis had set in and Wilcher
looked like a statue of The Thinker. They set his corpse on his toilet.[34] That is one way to
end an investigation into corruption. The official opinion is that the deaths of Casolaro and
Wilcher are unrelated suicides. More people besides Casolaro and Wilcher have died
regarding the Octopus-like activities surrounding the BCCI, Inslaw and related scandals.[35]

Stich chronicles the many ways that they silence whistleblowers. Stich tells how they took care
of him. The judges in California get creativity points in Stich's case; they used an angle I had
never heard of. Stich was a multimillionaire, married many years ago, and in the 1960s he
obtained a divorce in Texas. As Tom Bearden said about game theory, they look for chinks in
the target’s armor and go for the weak spot. Although Stich had been divorced for 26 years,
the judges in California said that California did not recognize his Texas divorce, declared him
still legally married to his ex-wife, and then used the community property laws to seize his
assets.[36] With no money, he was legally defenseless. Kangarooing somebody into prison
from that point is often merely a formality.

They made it up as they went along, not bothering to have a shred of legal standing for what
they did. The gangster judges handed down ruling after ruling that would make a lawyer's jaw
drop. Then they all wolfed down a chunk of Stich's six-million-dollar net worth. Free drinks for
everybody!

The Europeans always played off Native Americans against each other, and few natives ever
figured it out as they participated in their eventual annihilation. Similarly, with Stich they found
a greedy ex-wife who was willing to participate in the legal abomination so she could get at her
ex-husband's money. While reading Stich's account of events, I recalled seeing that game
played before, many times. His ex-wife’s participation in the fraud ruined her daughter's life,
drove her daughter's husband to suicide, and shattered several lives.

A critical lesson that humanity has yet to learn is that the ends never justify the means. The
means become the ends. One cannot use a means inconsistent with the desired end. Good
guys do not kill bad guys. That is a lie that too many believe. The devils in costume keep
playing that game, as long as people are stupid enough to fall for it. It is idiocy to think that
people can kill all the bad guys, and all that will be left are good guys. Maybe it happens in
John Wayne Western movies, but not in real life. It is another case of inverted logic. Orthodox
cancer treatment uses nearly the same premise: killing all the “bad” cells while sparing the
good. It does not work.

As Ralph McGehee makes clear in his Deadly Deceits, the CIA actively recruits people who
blindly follow orders.[37] The indoctrination and propaganda is intense, but is also merely a
continuation of the lies that children are taught in grade school history classes and see on TV.
I have known people who are part of "off-the-shelf" operations, where they do not officially work
for the CIA, but try holding down real jobs between stints with the spooks.

They are often recruited with a pitch about how covert action serves their country. The appeal
is usually to patriotism and/or the macho mentality. They are told that they are defending
freedom. They are trained in the art of murder and other activities. I have friends with a lot of
blood on their hands, whom I will not name, because blowing their cover could risk their lives.
They were either young or gullible, and seduced into the program. Generally, their covert
action jobs ruined them as human beings. Nobody murders somebody, even when told that
they are killing "bad guys," with clean hands and consciences, except true dark path initiates.
The CIA’s headquarters are full of zombies who kind of figured it out, but are trapped in their
careers and drink themselves silly until retirement.

Once in a great while, a covert action soldier wakes up and his conscience takes over. Ralph
McGehee and Philip Agee are two such men. Ralph published his CIABASE on the Internet.
He is more than 70 years old. His CIABASE was composed of public domain information. He
used no classified information. Nevertheless, his activities exposed the CIA for what it is.
They made Ralph's life a living hell for daring to speak up. They tried to silence him for years,
trying to frame him for crimes and other dirty tactics, but since he was doing nothing illegal,
and the CIA's harassment of him was illegal, Ralph was hanging in there, though some days
were worse than others. In early 2000, as Ralph was writing about how our “aid” to the
Colombian government looked remarkably similar to how the Vietnam experience began, the
CIA stepped up the harassment by spiking his food and causing injury to his mouth. Ralph’s
CIABASE is now out of business.

The CIA has been partly responsible for the deaths of millions of people throughout the world,
as it helps keep the majority of humanity enslaved to the neocolonial system. If humanity
survives the transition we are in the early stages of today, the coming age will not have secret
agencies and spies. Secrecy and deception are tools of dark path initiates, not light path
beings. When light path beings resort to such tactics to “fight the dark,” they have already
lost. The CIA, FBI, NSA and related institutions are primarily self-serving, or what most would
call “evil.” The American people are carefully brainwashed into believing that they need them,
to "protect" them.

Phil Agee did not abide by the secrecy agreement as Ralph McGehee did, and he wrote Inside
the Company abroad and named names. He had a rougher ride than Ralph. Inside the
Company and On the Run documents what the CIA did to Agee. One trick was using a
bugged typewriter to find his hiding place in Paris, while he was writing Inside the Company.
They tried luring him to Spain to "neutralize" him before he finished the book. After he
published Inside the Company, he was kicked out of several European countries before he
gained political asylum in West Germany. He lost his homeland by publishing how the CIA
works.

Some results of the CIA's machinations help to bring cheap oil and other commodities to
America, and many Americans have consciously prostituted themselves. They realize that the
CIA and gang are creating immense death and destruction throughout the world, but as long as
they enjoy cheap gasoline, coffee, bananas and tennis shoes, they think it is great. Many in
the upper classes think that the CIA, FBI and NSA are great institutions, keeping the chips
flowing their way. Those who condone bloodshed and exploitation in the service of their
lifestyles, often coming up with highly strained rationales, will create future circumstances
where they will find the shoe on the other foot. They will experience what slavery is like, barely
surviving while their masters live in opulence.

On the issue of UFOs, there has been credible data and testimony from impeccable sources.
Steven Greer, MD, founded and has run the Center for the Study of Extraterrestrial Intelligence
(CSETI) since 1991. His strategy during the past several years has been honorable and
difficult to defeat. Greer has been rounding up astronauts, politicians, military leaders
(generals, and about 400 people in all), and other experts and high-ranking people, persuading
them to testify about what they know about UFOs. As Dennis Lee has done, Greer knocked
on the front door, walking right up to the White House, the military, Congress, the CIA, the
United Nations and presenting his material. Of the 100 witnesses that Greer originally rounded
up, more than fifty wanted immunity from the national security laws before they would testify.
More than forty wanted to testify, and as far as they were concerned, the national security laws
could be damned. Those numbers were when Greer only had 100 witnesses willing to speak.
His total numbers have quadrupled, but most of those 300 additional witnesses also want
protection before they will testify.

Greer approached the establishment with their own people, making the impossible-to-fairly-
attack case that in humanity's common interest, the national security laws should be waived,
so those people can publicly tell what they know without being thrown into prison. If there was
nothing to hide about UFOs, the government has no defense. The witnesses Greer assembled
are impressive.[38] In April 1997, Greer presented eleven witnesses who testified under oath
to the U.S. Congress in secret hearings. The co-host of the presentation was a man who
walked on the moon, Apollo 14 astronaut Dr. Edgar Mitchell. The witnesses gave first-hand
testimonies, given under oath, of UFO encounters and related events. One person who did not
testify was, in words of Greer, an "Intelligence Officer privy to the disinformation plan to stage a
mock attack using back-engineered alien reproduction vehicles (ARVs), was picked up and
sequestered by Intelligence during the proceedings."

Greer and friends are trying to bring the issue into a public forum, and waiving the national
security laws so they can testify without being sent straight to prison. Greer's plan is
unassailable, yet the merciless attacks on Greer in 1997 were beyond bizarre. Even his
supposed allies in the UFO field attacked him, trying to wrap him up in copyright issues and
other drivel. People accused Greer of ridiculous things (such as he would make a killing and
control the movement). How can he control anything by having public hearings where
witnesses can testify without fear of reprisal? The plan is unassailable, which is why the
attacks on him were so irrational. The glib attacks were largely made by organizations and
people that I suspect have intelligence connections, posing publicly as UFO enthusiasts, but in
reality working to discredit or otherwise attack the real deal coming forward. It is similar "logic"
to prosecuting Dennis' Seattle company for "consumer protection," when the customers risked
none of the their money as they purchased Dennis' heat pump. Logic does not matter if one
has the bully pulpit to lie from.

The witnesses are not rabid, wild-eyed conspiracy theorists, but people such as astronauts
who want to safely testify in a public forum. Those hearings would probably be one of human
history’s biggest events, and the man trying to make it happen is attacked from all sides.

A recent example of this nation's response to that secret Congressional testimony, and the
threat of public knowledge that we are not alone in the universe, is David Adair. Adair has
been on the Art Bell Show since he testified, and his story is incredible. Adair testified to an
experience that he had at Area 51 in 1971. He says that he built a fusion rocket as a teenager,
with U.S. government sponsorship and theoretical assistance from Stephen Hawking, before
he developed Lou Gehrig's Disease. Hawking was involved because a partial black hole was
used as the containment field for the fusion reaction. The rocket was launched in New Mexico
and landed at Area 51 in Nevada. At Area 51, Arthur Rudolf, one of the NASA Nazis, asked
Adair to look at something. Adair was taken underground and shown what he believed to be a
star drive from an alien craft. It was like his fusion engine, but a thousand times bigger, and it
was alive, an organic fusion engine. Adair determined that it had a containment failure. Adair
was only 17 years old, and was going to be locked up when the legendary Curtis LeMay came
and rescued Adair from jail, because he was a friend of the family and suspected that Adair
was in trouble.

LeMay ran the Strategic Air Command, and was Barry Goldwater's buddy. Goldwater, who lost
the presidential election to Lyndon Johnson in 1964, was a brigadier general in the National
Guard, one of America's highest-ranking politicians, and a pal of the highest-ranking military
officials. One day at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Goldwater was shooting the breeze with
LeMay and asked if he could see the legendary Blue Room and Hangar 18, reputed home of
captured craft, frozen aliens and other extraterrestrial paraphernalia. According to Goldwater,
LeMay became the angriest he had ever seen him. He shouted at Goldwater that he had
better never hear him ask that question again. It is the highest official admission of what might
be going on behind the national security veil that I know of. Goldwater talked for years about
that event, even on Larry King Live to a national audience. There are published letters that
Goldwater wrote, confirming the story.[39]

Adair says that LeMay rescued him from Area 51, and on the way back home to Mount
Vernon, Ohio, LeMay told Adair to stop making rockets, and Adair says that he readily
complied, not wanting to risk what nearly happened at Area 51. Adair has been involved in the
space program ever since, and is buddies with many astronauts, and his company's equipment
goes up in the space shuttles regularly.
Adair testified to Congress, under oath, and told them that their own records can prove his
story, as they provided the funding to build his rocket. He talked about it on Art Bell to a
national audience. Adair said that if he was lying, they could lock him up tomorrow, as he
would have perjured himself.[40] His story is unbelievable. It also might be true.

Where were the "skeptics," leaping all over Adair, proving him to be a fraud? There was barely
a peep. Look on the Internet for commentary on Adair. His story and credentials cannot be
hard to attack if they are bogus. Nobody made a credible effort.

Greer's right hand throughout his UFO activism was Shari Adamiak, who was with him every
step of the way. When they held those hearings in April 1997, they were both about forty years
old. How they could be stopped legally or ethically was difficult to imagine, walking in the
government's front door with their witnesses. Two months after the hearings, Greer and
Adamiak both came down with cancer. What are the odds of that "coincidence"? There may
be a Curare and Cancer Department in one of America’s intelligence agencies. The collective
response by the UFO crowd to Greer and Adamiak’s illness was a yawn. Adamiak died on
January 20, 1998. Greer is still alive.

With America’s collective catatonia and the government's stonewalling of Greer's activities,
Greer has been forced into doing what he tried avoiding: bypassing the official channels in
getting the information out there. Part of his Disclosure Project has been to publish
Extraterrestrial Contact. His organization has been preparing documentation and video
testimony, if nobody will allow it through the official channels. It will not be surprising if more
"coincidental" problems befall Greer and his organization.

Those situations should have a certain resonance with right wing Americans. What the
government did to the Branch Davidians at Waco, Texas in 1993 was obviously a diabolically
planned mass murder. As with The Panama Deception, the documentary Rules of
Engagement was nominated for an Academy Award. It did not win, but stands as the best
audio-visual summary regarding what our government did to those people. Americans should
be justly outraged by what happened there. Yet, it is a microcosm of what America has done
to Iraq, for instance. The American government murdered more than a dozen children at
Waco. It has murdered hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children, with the death toll still
climbing. It murdered millions of Southeast Asian people during the 1960s and 1970s. The
Waco Massacre was relatively mild when compared to what happened to Black Kettle’s
people, not all that far from Waco.

In a familiar pattern, the Branch Davidian survivors were prosecuted for the deaths of the storm
troopers who attacked them (probably killed by their own Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and
Firearms (BATF) buddies). The men who died in the attack were some of Bill Clinton’s
bodyguards, on loan from the Secret Service. They are more people on the Bill Clinton Body
Count, and may have known too much. The Branch Davidians fought back and waged their
own unlawful death lawsuit against the murdering feds. Several experts were going to testify
on the Branch Davidians’ behalf regarding the infrared film footage that clearly depicts the
government agents firing machine guns into the Davidian compound as they set it on fire.
Expert Carlos Ghigliotti was going to testify regarding the footage. He conveniently died of a
“heart attack,” soon before he could testify. He was only 42. Edward Allard, another expert
who was going to testify, had an incapacitating stroke a few weeks before Ghigliotti died. At
about the same time Ghigliotti was dying, Fred Zegel, another expert who was going to testify,
suddenly came down with blood poisoning and barely survived. Another expert who was going
to testify, Maurice Cox, had a sudden worsening of his kidney problems at the same time those
others had their ”mishaps.” Michael McNulty, who produced Rules of Engagement, has major
doubts that they were coincidental. The sudden incapacitation and/or death of those experts
pretty much destroyed the chance those Davidian plaintiffs had in court. Was it another string
of fortunate “coincidences” for the American government? They ply their trade with more
subtlety than when David Ferrie died of a “drug overdose” just before Jim Garrison’s JFK
assassination investigation could get to him, or George de Mohrenschildt “committing suicide”
the very day that HSCA investigator Gaeton Fonzi contacted him, and many other amazing
and unfortunate coincidences.[41]

Similarly, the evidence is strong that Timothy McVeigh’s fertilizer bomb could not have done
the damage to the Oklahoma City federal building that it did. The Air Force conducted tests at
Eglin Air Force Base in Florida after the Oklahoma City bombing, and Brigadier General
Benton K. Partin, one of the world’s leading experts on explosives and ordnance, led the
research. They found that an air bomb, which was what McVeigh set off, could not possibly do
the damage to the Oklahoma City federal building that it supposedly did. An air bomb would
have blown out the windows of the federal building and not much else. There had to be other
bombs inside the building in order to take out those reinforced concrete columns, which meant
that a sophisticated bombing took place, far more than McVeigh and his buddy could have
done. McVeigh apparently was a fall guy, as were Oswald and Sirhan, but maybe it was not a
government/spook action, but perhaps a backfired covert operation, as the JFK assassination
was. There is a great deal of evidence of prior knowledge of the bombing. Everybody at the
BATF in that building (except for the support staff) stayed home on the day of the bombing.
The Oklahoma governor’s brother wrote a novel before the Oklahoma City bombing, where he
described a terrorist bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City, performed by some nut
named Tom McVey. How far do we want to stretch coincidence?

What about Those American Hostages in Iran?

Why did the Iranians release the hostages the day Reagan was inaugurated? The Iran-Contra
scandal gave plenty of evidence why, as the United States was shipping arms to our "enemy,"
Iran. The Iranian hostage crisis was an albatross around Jimmy Carter's neck that helped
derail his reelection bid. There is substantial evidence pointing to a deal being made between
Ronald Reagan's election campaign team and the Iranian government, to hold onto the
hostages until after the presidential election. It looks as if George Bush may have helped
negotiate the deal.[42] The federal government "investigated" and dismissed the October
Surprise allegation. They did not really put the allegations to bed, just as the Warren
Commission did not regarding JFK's death.

America's political milieu around 1980-1981 is one of American history’s scariest periods.
Numerous conspiracy theories swirl around Ronald Reagan's choice of George Bush as his
running mate. Bush has a long pedigree in the Eastern Oligarchy and covert activities. Bush
ran the CIA and was a member of David Rockefeller's Trilateral Commission, as were many
members of the federal government. Bush has apparently admitted that David Rockefeller was
his mentor.[43] Rumors abound that Reagan chose Bush because of Rockefeller's influence.
A little-known member of David Rockefeller's Trilateral Commission also became president,
rising from obscurity to win the 1976 presidential election: Jimmy Carter. David's brother
Nelson was vice president while two assassination attempts were made on Gerald Ford,
bringing Nelson within a bullet of being the second president who was never on a ballot, and
Ford was the first.

While Bush was apparently in Paris in October 1980, negotiating the hostage release with Iran,
it looks like the wheels were moving to put some bona fide gangsters in charge of the federal
government. Immediately after Reagan was elected, one man was coming out of a five-year
hibernation, after barely escaping deportation proceedings that were only forestalled because
Richard Nixon was run out of office. Ironically, both Nixon and Reagan ran on the
law-and-order platform and probably had the two most lawless administrations in American
history. John Lennon was coming out of seclusion after five years. Not only was he in the
studio making his first album in five years, Double Fantasy, he was also coming out of his
political hibernation. In light of what happened after Reagan's inauguration, Lennon was on a
short list of those who could have mobilized average Americans against what Reagan's boys
were about to do to Central America and other nations. Lennon won Nixon's hatred with his
high-profile Vietnam protests, which was why they tried to deport him.

A controversial situation got CIA-man Bush on the ticket, a man who may have helped
engineer October Surprise. A few weeks after Reagan was inaugurated, the State Department
floated a white paper on February 23, 1981. The white paper was apparently a series of
forged documents that were supposed to help justify the reign of terror that the Reagan
administration was about to wage in El Salvador, terrorizing the population and killing 75,000
civilians while using about $6 billion in U.S. taxpayer money.[44]

Similar to the "assassins" of JFK, RFK, Martin Luther King, Jr. and John Lennon, those who
attempted to assassinate George Wallace, Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan were "lone nuts."
It is amazing that those "lone nuts" all pulled their triggers at critical or intriguing political
moments in American history. Oswald "killed" JFK soon after JFK declared that he planned to
pull American troops out of Vietnam. JFK's executive order to pull the troops out of Vietnam
was reversed before he was buried. Sirhan B. Sirhan "killed" RFK the night he won the
California democratic primary in 1968, vaulting into the front-runner position for the
presidency.

George Wallace came out of nowhere in 1968, in the first substantial third party threat in
presidential politics since Teddy Roosevelt's Bull Moose party, splitting the democratic vote
enough (especially with RFK gone) to usher repeated political loser Richard Nixon into the
White House. Wallace won several southern states that were traditional democratic shoe-ins
in presidential elections. Wallace ran again in 1972, and it looked as if he might gain enough
support to where no candidate would win enough Electoral College votes to be elected
president, where somebody like George McGovern might sneak into the White House. Right
then, a "lone nut" came out of the woodwork and gunned Wallace down, taking him out of the
running.[45]

We all know about the Watergate break-in. Or do we? What was that all about, a few
bumbling idiots working on Nixon's behalf? One participant was E. Howard Hunt, a man
undoubtedly (at least to me) involved in the events that led to JFK's assassination. Harrison
Livingstone is one of many who feels that the Watergate burglary was far from relatively
innocent intrigue regarding Nixon's smear techniques, but an attempt to cover up the political
murders that accompanied Nixon's rise to power.[46] Then Nixon’s own people brought him
down.

When Nixon and Spiro Agnew were taken out one at a time, they were replaced with "Magic
Bullet" Gerald Ford and Nelson Rockefeller.[47] Nelson Rockefeller was oligarchy personified.
Soon after Ford took office, two "lone nuts" tried taking him out, nearly making Nelson
Rockefeller the first president who was not on any ballot or picked by an elected president.
Maybe it was merely a series of extraordinary coincidences.

Reagan was elected with the help of the Iranian hostage albatross that Carter wore around his
neck, and a month later John Lennon was gunned down by another "lone nut." Then Reagan
was inaugurated, with the Iranians releasing the hostages on the same day, followed a few
weeks later by the fabricated white paper that helped set the stage for a ten-year reign of terror
in Central America. John Lennon was eminently qualified to lead the American people in
protesting the crucifixion of Central America. Just when Reagan was able to find the White
House bathroom on his own, he was gunned down by another "lone nut." That man was
"coincidentally" a friend of George Bush's family.

A few months later, Omar Torrijos, the leader of Panama, died in a mysterious plane crash. It
was similar to the “plane crashes” of John Tower and Audie Murphy, where the plane may have
exploded in mid-air, as though a bomb went off in it. The CIA had earlier plotted to assassinate
Torrijos, and it appears as if they may have finally succeeded.[48] That set the stage for the
reign of Manuel Noriega. George Bush later led America in invading Panama to take out
Noriega, supposedly for crimes Noriega committed while he was working for the CIA, which
Bush once ran.[49] A few months before Torrijos’ untimely demise, the helicopter of Ecuadorian
president Jaime Roldós exploded in mid-air. Self-admitted economic hit man John Perkins
knew both men, and is sure the CIA assassinated them both. The deaths of Mel Carnahan
and Paul Wellstone in 2000 and 2002 were domestic “plane crashes” that happened at
opportune moments for the Republicans, as those deaths happened just before election day,
and their candidates, who previously did not have a prayer, became shoo-ins on election day,
except that Carnahan’s opponent, John Ashcroft, lost to a dead man, as the people elected
Carnahan’s widow instead. Gary Wean saw that kind of “convenient” death of the incumbent in
his travails in Ventura County, where the unknown challenger ran unopposed as the “untimely”
death happened so close to election day.

After the assassination attempt, Reagan was a near vegetable for the next eight years of his
presidency. The Alzheimer's disease he has today probably began its progress with the
assassination attempt, if not earlier.

Alexander Cockburn related a revelation from Washington Post reporter Lou Cannon's The
Role of a Lifetime. Four months after the assassination attempt, Cannon interviewed Reagan.
rd
In the Washington Post on July 23 , 1981, he reported an interview with a tired but alert
president, coming back from an international summit, talking about how successful it was.

Ten years later, in The Role of a Lifetime, Cannon had something very different to report.
Cannon wrote,
"What was surprising to me was Reagan's condition. He was exhausted to the point of
incoherence throughout much of the interview and could not remember the substance of any
subject that had been discussed apart from Mitterrand's expression of anticommunism. I had
not seen Reagan at such close range since the assassination attempt nearly four months
earlier, and was shocked at his condition…Reagan simply was unable to recall the content of
the talks in which he just participated…The interview concluded…at a signal from Deaver, who
did not seem to find the president's condition unusual."

Cockburn wrote,

"At the time of the shooting, the press was full of phrases like 'bouncing back,' 'iron
constitution,' and other terms indicating that Reagan had emerged from the ordeal in good
shape. In fact Reagan very nearly died on the operating table and was a dotard afterwards.
He never fully recovered.

"Conclusion: Unless a president is actually dead, the White House press corps can be relied
upon to present him as both sentient and sapient, no matter how decrepit his physical and
mental condition."[50]

There are stories and film footage of President Reagan falling asleep at conferences and other
embarrassing situations. When Reagan testified after he stepped down from the presidency
about the Iran-Contra scandal, and said, "I can't remember" far more than one hundred times
during his two days of testimony, he may have been telling the truth. His acting career came in
handy, though, and he generally remembered his lines and read his cue cards for the rest of
his presidency.

All those "coincidental" assassinations and assassination attempts have plenty surrounding
them that make people wonder. For instance, every single one of those "lone nuts" was
connected in some way to U.S. intelligence operations. The evidence on Oswald is
overwhelming. Mark David Chapman, Lennon's assassin, worked for a CIA front organization.
Sirhan had strange and shadowy connections to CIA-related mind control operations, and
Sirhan acted like a Manchurian Candidate. See the movie of that name starring Frank Sinatra,
which like The China Syndrome was a little too prescient, and was pulled from circulation and
not shown for many years in America after the JFK assassination.

E. Howard Hunt was a novelist, among his many talents, and his writing colleague Gore Vidal
all but accused Hunt of writing the "diary" of the lone nut Arthur Bremer, the man who shot
George Wallace. Vidal thought that Bremer's diary was a little too writerly, something Vidal
thought Hunt was just the man to write, doing his part in fabricating another "lone nut."[51]

Besides working for a CIA front organization, there are strange events surrounding Mark David
Chapman’s shooting of Lennon. Chapman originally purchased a plane ticket to Chicago, but
ended up in New York. There were days of unaccounted time. When Chapman signed
Lennon's name in Hawaii when he quit his job, it was odd. There is little evidence that
Chapman was particularly interested in Lennon from a fan's point of view. Chapman was a big
fan of Todd Rundgren, but Chapman was not even as big a Lennon fan as I am. What was
going on in his head? Were his handlers preparing him for the deed in Chicago? Immediately
after he gunned Lennon down, he sat down on the curb, reached into his pocket, pulled out
The Catcher in the Rye and began reading it, a kind of Manchurian Candidate behavior one
encounters if they begin looking into MK-ULTRA and related programs. Chapman has not
acted crazy while he has been in prison.[52]

When Ronald Reagan was shot, even though his limousine left the scene five minutes before
James Brady's did, it arrived at the hospital fifteen minutes after Brady's did. What happened
in those twenty missing minutes? Was Reagan told how it was going to be, while he lay there
in agony? Reagan admitted that he did not feel anything until the Secret service agent jumped
on top of him in the limousine. It appears that a strange bullet entered Reagan’s ribs. The
projectile created a small, nearly bloodless wound, and the doctors almost did not find the
dime-shaped fléchette. More strangeness was a "lone nut" that was a long-time friend of the
Bush family. Bush and Hinckley's dad went way back to the good old Texas oil days. The day
of the assassination attempt, Hinckley's older brother had a dinner date with George's son
Neil. It's a small world.[53]

In most of those assassinations and attempts, there was evidence of more bullets flying than
the assassin's gun actually fired. The "lone nut" was usually immediately apprehended, and all
other suspects were immediately released. "No conspiracy" was announced within hours of
each shooting, even in the case of Martin Luther King, when there was no suspect immediately
after his shooting.[54]

Was political assassination the standard policy by those who really ran America from 1963 to
1981, serving up a "lone nut" scapegoat each time? There were many, many other strange
and/or untimely deaths of high-ranking CIA, FBI and political folks, such as J. Edgar Hoover,
William Sullivan, William Casey, John Tower, Hale Boggs, William Colby and others. In the
1970s, there apparently was a “spook war” taking place, not much different than a Mafia gang
war, except that politicians and bureaucrats were being murdered. As with the rash of strange,
violent and untimely deaths surrounding the JFK assassination, political murder while killing
more people to tie up the loose ends may be standard practice in America.

There may not have been even one "lone nut" in American presidential assassination history,
going clear back to Lincoln. Lincoln's is the only undeniable conspiracy (except the House
Select Committee on Assassinations' lame position on JFK's death), as the conspirators tried
killing a number of people on the same night. There are interesting theories regarding how far
that conspiracy may have reached. The standard right wing theory is that the European
bankers bumped off Lincoln because he cut out the central banks and printed "greenbacks,"
and JFK was initiating a similar program soon before he died.[55]

9/11 – The Mother of all Conspiracy Theories

On the evening of September 10, 2001, I bought airplane tickets to Ohio to visit pals from my
trucking days. The next morning I called my old trucking mentor, letting him know I was flying
out there in a couple of weeks. He replied, “No you’re not,” and told me to turn on the
television. When I did, both World Trade Center towers were on fire but still standing. At that
moment, I knew that my efforts to heal the planet were too little and too late. There have been
no surprises since then for me. Orwell’s permanent war was dusted off and used by George
Bush the Second and the neoconservatives to justify all manner of imperial outrage.
Aggressive invasions in “self defense,” in defiance of international law and world opinion,
torture centers, outlawed weapons used on invaded nations, police state tactics used on its
domestic citizens and so forth - it is no mystery why America became a pariah nation so soon
after 9/11, when the U.S. was the object of so much global sympathy.

What was also not surprising was the immediate suspicion among many that 9/11 was too
convenient a “gift” for Bush and neocons, and that they had something to do with 9/11. In
2004, half of New York City’s residents believed that the Bush administration had
foreknowledge of 9/11 and allowed it to happen.[56] A friend living in Manhattan was skeptical
of the “inside job” angle of 9/11, until Bush named Henry Kissinger, Mr. Cloak and Dagger, to
head the 9/11 Commission. Kissinger resigned when he had to reveal his business
relationships.

Partly because of my work on the JFK Assassination, the moon landings and other
controversies, I have some access to the 9/11 independent researcher community. In 2004, I
made the suggestion that the 9/11 researchers should concentrate on the most provable
findings and stay away from the more speculative theories, if they want to make a persuasive
case to the public. My suggestion sparked a flame war amongst the researchers, which
confirmed the observation I made about the JFK researchers. In late 2005, a physics
professor from BYU, a conservative bastion if there ever was one, published an academic
paper that supported the theory that World Trade Center building number 7 was taken down by
controlled demolition, which led to the theory that the main World Trade Center (WTC) towers
were also collapsed in a controlled demolition. The faculties of two Utah universities
unanimously accepted his findings. In the wake of publishing his study, he made the same
suggestion that I did: researchers should focus their efforts on the most provable aspects of
the 9/11 controversy and stop fighting with each other.

Because of the time I spent looking into the JFK assassination, the moon landings and so
forth, I realized that it would take time and effort beyond my means and inclination to do a
creditable investigation of the 9/11 evidence. However, I have spent more than a hundred
hours looking at the evidence over the years, and I think the most compelling and fruitful
avenues of investigation today include:

Only three steel-framed buildings have collapsed due to fire in world history - all WTC
towers, all on the same day, and WTC7 was not hit by a plane and only had small fires in
it when it collapsed, and all three collapsed in a manner consistent with controlled
demolition;

In the most protected airspace on earth (over Washington D.C.), America’s entire
national security apparatus was caught flatfooted, and the Secretary of Defense himself
sat in his office as a plane hit the Pentagon, where he was working, nearly an hour after
the first World Trade Center tower was hit;
 On 9/11, there were numerous war games being engaged in by the U.S. Air Force and
NORAD, with even one “live” hijacking plane in the air; this may help explain the
non-response by the U.S. military to the hijackings, and is eerily similar to the fake
assassination attempt on JFK that turned into a real one - and the Bush family is
intimately connected to both events;

A hijacker’s passport miraculously appeared on the ground after the WTC attacks,
emerging unscathed from the fiery crash into the WTC; conversely, no black box
information from any of the planes has ever been made public;

The plane that allegedly hit the Pentagon performed aerial feats that the experts may not
be able to reproduce, but a pilot who never trained beyond a simulator supposedly did it
(again, similar to Oswald’s irreproducible feats of marksmanship to shoot JFK); all
footage that may have shown a plane hitting the Pentagon has been seized by the
federal government and never shown publicly, and there are numerous other anomalies
with the plane that allegedly hit the Pentagon;

In the days leading up to 9/11, a highly unusual number of share options of both United
and American Airlines were sold short (betting the share price would decline), and the
profits made by those speculators may have amounted to many millions of dollars;

The plane that crashed in Pennsylvania left more than one debris field, and they were
several miles apart, a fact inconsistent with the official version of events - the plane
apparently began coming apart before crashing, evidence of either a bomb going off on
it, or it being shot down.

Of course, if the U.S. government was complicit in 9/11, they are not going to mount an
impartial investigation, and the official 9/11 Commission findings were deficient in numerous
areas. At best, there is plenty that the American people are not being told about the events of
September 1, 2005. At worst, 9/11 was staged or allowed to happen, to give Bush and the
neocons free reign with their imperial ambitions. After all, they were the primary beneficiaries
of 9/11 (along with perhaps Osama bin Laden). Cui bono?

Is Anything Being Covered up about the Apollo Moon

Landings?
Warning: This part of this essay can seem technical and arcane, and will not interest many
readers. In summary, after years of looking at the evidence, I proved to my satisfaction that
the moon landings happened as officially portrayed, and did not discover anything of great
significance covered up about them, while uncovering positive evidence that convinced me that
the moon landings really happened. To bypass this Apollo section and skip to the essay’s end,
take this link.

The single year of my father’s career not spent working for the Department of Defense was his
year with NASA, working for Chris Kraft in the Mission Control Room in Houston. It was
1966-1967, in the heat of the space race. I was a Houston space brat, and have had an
unflagging interest in NASA and the exploration of space. I watched many of the 1960s space
shots live on television, and lived in Houston when those astronauts died in the 1967 fire, and
its aftermath made my father decide to quit NASA, as the environment became hyper-political,
with everybody trying to cover their backsides and pointing the finger at everybody else. As
with Brian O'Leary (see his The Making of an Ex-astronaut), my father felt that Texas did not
compare favorably to California. I will never forget when those astronauts died, with my father
watching on television an event that he experienced at work that day. NASA personnel
(including my father) eventually heard the horrifying sounds as those men died. When the
Challenger shuttle exploded in 1986, it took me back to that day in 1967, and I felt sick.

My father had a top-secret security clearance, and NASA was quasi-military in its approach to
the moon shots.

I have slowly become aware that NASA has been less than honest with the American people.
Richard Hoagland used to be a NASA spokesman, sitting next to Walter Cronkite during the
space shots. Similar to O'Leary, Hoagland left NASA's fold and became critical and suspicious
of it. For many years, I have read of UFOs accompanying the astronauts through space,
watched footage of some of those UFOs, heard legends about Armstrong and Aldrin freaking
out on the moon when alien craft landed next to them (during a two-minute television
"blackout"), checking the experimental equipment they set out. Through the Apollo program,
all the astronauts had military backgrounds, and as such, national security laws could be held
over their heads to keep them silent.

My first introduction to a possible NASA cover-up was around 1991 when I read William Brian's
Moongate. Brian did not make the case that the moon landings were faked, but that there was
plenty covered up about them. He began his book with the well-known military-NASA
connection. Then he discussed the “neutral point discrepancy,” which is the difference in
various accounts of the point in space where the gravitational pull of the moon and earth would
be equal on a spacecraft traveling between them. Brian cited several sources before the moon
landings that calculated the neutral point about twenty thousand miles from the moon. Then
he cited several sources that described the neutral point during the Apollo moon shots. Those
sources cited a neutral point about forty thousand miles from the moon's surface. Brian asked
what changed in those intervening years. He made the case that the neutral point should be
about twenty thousand miles from the moon's surface, and if it was really forty thousand miles,
then the moon has a much stronger surface gravity than previously supposed. Brian derived
the neutral point calculation and the moon's surface gravity if the neutral point was forty
thousand miles, and derived a surface gravity for the moon that was 64% of earth's, not the
16% we have been told.

Brian then followed a trail of other evidence, such as the astronauts' experiences on the moon,
the evidence of a lunar atmosphere and other anomalies, and Brian made the case that NASA
probably used non-rocket technology to land on the moon and take off from it, which means
that if we have anti-gravity technology, we also have free energy technology. I was impressed
with Brian's reasoning, and for years I threw down his work in front of the "skeptics,"
challenging somebody to show me where Brian was wrong. For years, nobody ever did. I
have seen Brian called a "kook" (see Donna Kossy's Kooks, pp. 65-66) and other names.
Nobody, however, ever showed me where Brian was wrong; they would just smile.
Finally, in the late 1990s, Leroy Ellenberger directed me to Archie Roy's Orbital Motion, the
leading text on orbital mechanics. Orbital Motion calculated the neutral point.[57] It was the
forty thousand miles in the Apollo-era literature. Brian found a neutral point discrepancy all
right, but it apparently was a discrepancy between the less sophisticated equation that Brian
and many others used, and the one that Roy derived. The neutral point discrepancy
essentially vanished, as far as demonstrating that the moon's surface gravity was higher than
one-sixth of earth's. Because the neutral point discrepancy was the foundation of Brian's
arguments, I thought it made his entire case shaky, and let him know it.

Mine was apparently the first legitimate challenge that Brian ever received regarding his work.
Far less substantial works often receive the full blast of the "skeptics." My Moongate
experience was educational, and it showed me one more way that establishment challenges
can be flawed.

All that stated, Brian and others highlighted anomalies that made me think. Years after first
reading Moongate, I slowly became aware of a small group of people who made the case that
we never landed men on the moon. Even the seemingly crazy conspiracy theories have
received my attention over the years.

The first person to publicly question the notion that we sent men to the moon was Bill Kaysing,
with the 1976 publication of his We Never Went to the Moon, written with Randy Reid. Kaysing
worked for the space program in the 1960s, with a security clearance. Kaysing's book is more
of a booklet, less than one hundred pages long. Kaysing made the case that the moon
landings were faked. He pointed to the shroud of secrecy that pervaded the entire space
program, with accidents being covered up. That was true. The Space Race was more of a
Cold War project than anything else. The military was heavily involved, along with many
defense contractors, called “aerospace” firms. Kaysing pointed out numerous anomalies
regarding the moon shots. Some anomalies had not yet been explained to my satisfaction, but
Kaysing’s effort in his We Never Went to the Moon was not convincing. He presented photos
of the Apollo moon landings that he thought were faked. Some evidence was compelling, but
more was easily explained. A plausible prosaic explanation does not mean that it is the correct
explanation. ”Skeptics” have continually invoked Carl Sagan’s aphorism, “Extraordinary claims
require extraordinary evidence.” One problem is that Sagan was not an even-handed
practitioner of the skeptical trade. He often played judge, jury and executioner regarding
anomalous evidence, unfairly using his reputation to outweigh his arguments, making his own
rulings on what an “extraordinary claim” and what “extraordinary evidence” was. If people can
rig the game, they always win.

Kaysing admitted that his work was purely speculative, and was about the first to question
whether men really landed on the moon.

In the 1990s, Ralph René weighed in. In NASA Mooned America! he advanced several lines
of evidence that the moon landings were faked. Kaysing made the case, and René makes it
more convincingly, that there were faked/altered photographs from the moon landings and the
space program in general. In one photo, René makes the case that a space walk photo of
Michael Collins during the Gemini program was actually a composite image fabricated from a
photo of him taken in that NASA zero-G plane, during a training mission. The photos in
question were from a book by Collins titled Carrying the Fire.
René points out several anomalies in a photo of Charles Duke standing next to the Lunar
Rover during the Apollo 16 mission. It is about the most famous “moon hoax” photograph.
One anomaly is the Rover track that shows it making a ninety-degree turn in a few feet, while
bounding over a boulder, a remarkable feat in one-sixth gravity. More intriguing is a rock in the
foreground with the letter "C" on it, as if it was a stage prop on a movie set. The “C” has
repeatedly been explained away as a fabrication perpetrated by “moon hoaxer” crowd, and has
been explained as an innocent later generation image, where a NASA technician put the “C”
there as a note to correct the color control for the image. In July 2001, Steve Troy, one of
Richard Hoagland’s sidekicks, posted his research on the “C” rock, showing that it was a “hair”
that got on a lens in copying a later generation of the image. His work has been the most
convincing of all.

René also noted something seen in numerous photos. The detailed foreground quickly
becomes a distant background, as if the foreground was real and the background was a matte
shot. NASA’s explanation is that because the moon is so much smaller than the earth, its
curvature is greater, and a fall off from close to far away happens much more abruptly. Also,
there is the “crosshair” anomaly. In all the NASA moon photos are gridlines, which are part of
the cameras. The gridlines should be superimposed over all images, meaning that they hide
what is behind them. The gridlines are made from thin lines, so they do not mar the
photographs. There are many NASA space photos with those grid lines going behind the
objects. The problem with the “faked” hypothesis is they always seem to go behind white
objects. It is possible that in printing the photographs, the white areas bleed over those thin
black lines, creating the effect. That is a potentially innocent explanation, although the Collins
space walk photo appears to be a composite, though perhaps “innocent.” That Rover
photograph is about the most impressive case of the white “bleeding” over a crosshair. There
has been plenty of analysis on the Internet of the reticle-“bleeding” phenomenon, the moon
hoax debunker explanation seems most persuasive at this time. Here is the photograph in
question.

Click on image to enlarge

One of René’s theories is that the radiation the astronauts would have been subject to after
passing through the Van Allen belt (which shields earth from harmful solar radiation) would
have fried them. René's calculations show that the astronauts would have been subject to
hundreds of rems per day past the Van Allen belt, while on earth getting more than one rem
per year is beyond the safety limits for most people. There is substantial literature regarding
the radiation risk and the exposure that the Apollo astronauts received. There were two
radiation risks. The first was radiation within the Van Allen belt. The second was the radiation
the astronauts would have been exposed to beyond the protection of the Van Allen belt.

The Van Allen belt is created by earth’s magnetic field, and it protects earth from harmful solar
and cosmic radiation. At the poles, the Van Allen belt is weakest and more radiation gets
through, causing the northern and southern lights. Radiation workers have a maximum
allowable annual dose of one-to-five rems per year. A rem (Roentgen Equivalent Man) is the
standard unit of measure in the radiation sciences; it is related to the rad. In the Van Allen belt,
an astronaut is exposed to about one rem per hour. The Apollo astronauts theoretically
passed through the Van Allen belts quickly, only receiving about one rem for each pass
through the belts. So, they received in a couple of hours about what radiation workers on earth
should maximally receive in a year.

The National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements (NCRP) proposed guidelines
for astronauts in 1989 that NASA accepted. It set a 30-day skin exposure of 150 rems, and a
career exposure of 600 rems. There are two basic kinds of radiation risks. One is the
short-term acute risk, and the other is the long-term risk. The short-term risk is relatively
uncontroversial. It has been documented in horrifying detail from accidents in America's
nuclear program, the Chernobyl disaster, other nuclear accidents and dropping nuclear bombs
on Japan. If a man receives a dose of 1000 rems in a day, he will die within a few days, his
insides being literally cooked. If he only gets 350 rems, he will likely die within a month. A
35-rem dose will make him sick.

The second radiation risk is what the astronauts would be subjected to past the Van Allen belt.
The Van Allen belt contains high-energy sub-atomic particles, but the belt also protects earth
from the high-energy particles/waves from space. The two sources from space are the sun
and the galaxy. The sun produces deadly radiation continually, and the Van Allen belt and
earth’s atmosphere (such as the ozone layer) protects us from the worst of it. The sun’s most
deadly radiation comes from eruptions known as solar flares. The other radiation is galactic
cosmic radiation (GCR), which comes from the galaxy.

The largest solar flare ever recorded was in 1972, between the Apollo 16 and 17 missions. If
astronauts were beyond the Van Allen belt during that flare, they could have been exposed to
more than 1000 rem, which would have killed them before they came back to earth. That is a
real risk in going into space, although the Apollo astronauts did not receive acute doses during
the Apollo missions. As with today’s weather, solar flares are not very predictable, although
there can be some warning, and NASA tried to be solar weathermen before the Apollo
missions. They were playing solar-flare roulette during the Apollo missions, but NASA
assessed the probable risk of a solar flare hitting an Apollo mission and decided it was small.

The acute dose risk is well known. The long-term risk with non-acute doses is more
problematic. The American military establishment manipulated and suppressed the data
regarding the harm that fluorine inflicts on the human body. With declassified documents, it is
now known that the Atomic Energy Commission and other federal agencies actively covered
up the harmful effects of fluorine and fluorides. The cover-up continues to this day. Those
same agencies have also produced the data regarding the long-term harmful effects of
radiation. A nightmarish Pandora’s box is opened when researching the cover-up taking place
regarding numerous chemicals produced by industry and government, such as lead, dioxins
and other organic compounds. The scientist in charge of the Chernobyl clean up, Dr.
Chernousenko, risked his life to make public what he knew about the radiation damage the
Chernobyl disaster caused. He estimated that perhaps one million lives will ultimately be lost
due to the disaster, and he revealed that the "International Atomic Mafia" has been actively
covering up not only the Chernobyl disaster, but also the hazards of radiation in general. The
American doctor John Gofman has been making the same arguments for many years, detailing
how the radiation data is being manipulated to minimize the long-term radiation risks. That is a
frightening area of research, but the Apollo astronauts would apparently not have been
unusually exposed as compared to other radiation workers, and they have not yet died of
long-term radiation poisoning, but those effects are not easy to identify, being more statistical
effects (usually cancer deaths) rather than obvious symptomatology.

There are solar flares every day, but they are relatively small. In his book, René calculated
that the astronauts subject to everyday solar flares would have been subjected to 375 rems per
day. His calculations are suspect, partly because few of those solar flares would be “aimed” at
earth. All the same, the radiation issue was a hazard that any manned lunar mission would
have faced. It appears that the official analyses of the radiation risk involved with a lunar
mission, and the subsequent exposures received by the astronauts, “explains away” this
anomaly, although it is obvious that the radiation hazard meant that every Apollo astronaut that
passed beyond the Van Allen belt was risking his life in more ways than one.

Then along came James Collier, who produced a video titled Was it only a Paper Moon?
Collier pointed out numerous anomalies in the moon footage, including footage from Apollo 16
that shows the astronauts on two different days, in two locations, with the identical foreground.
I practically fell off my chair when I saw it. However, the raw footage that Collier did not have,
what NASA produced the footage from, actually took place a few minutes apart, and Collier
misidentified the rock-holder sitting next to the astronaut as the Lunar Rover. While that
showed that Collier performed a less-than-thorough investigation, it also showed the
“Hollywood” aspect of what NASA did. The NASA movie had goofy narrative by Charles Duke
as he rhapsodized about the moon’s beauty. The raw footage has no dialogue of the sort.
They were playing fast and loose in the editing room. It had me going for a while, before I saw
the raw footage. That was about the most impressive anomaly that Collier presented, and it
fell apart under scrutiny. Once again, the lunar hoax theorists failed to convince me.

Then along came David Percy and Mary Bennett with their Dark Moon. It presented the best
case for faked moon landings yet, although it still failed to convince me. Their work has
obvious flaws and is riddled with errors, although it gave food for thought.

Some of the Apollo Mission Anomalies

As I was writing this essay in early 2001, the TV network Fox aired a show about the moon
landings, addressing the various anomalies presented by Kaysing, René and others. In July of
2001, members of a moon hoax forum critiqued my work (thanks guys!), and an aeronautical
engineer, Jay Windley, convinced me on several issues that I had residual doubt about.
Among the issues being debated are:

1. The American flag rippled in the “breeze” on the moon;

2. Shadows do not run in parallel lines;

3. Astronauts standing in shadows are illuminated;

4. No visible exhaust issues from the lunar lander’s rockets;

5. There is no crater below the lunar landers;

6. The moon footage from Apollo 11 was of poor quality;

7. The radiation problem;

8. The “crosshair” problem;

9. Odd reflections;

10. People who might have talked died under mysterious circumstances;

11. The lack of athletic feats performed on the moon;

12. The Nazi connection;

13. The military-industrial complex connection;

14. The moon missions were relatively hitchless;

15. Faked photographs;

16. The Rover’s movement on the moon;

17. The Apollo 11 footage from Bart Sibrel’s video - a detailed analysis;

18. Other anomalies;

19. I hit pay dirt - evidence that convinced me that we landed men on the moon

The American flag rippled in the “breeze” on the moon.

There is a great deal of moon footage where the American flag is flapping, as if in a breeze.
Yet, in every scene, an astronaut is holding or touching the flagpole, or he let go a moment
before. The astronaut holding the flagpole could easily cause the flapping. The events
supposedly happened in a vacuum and low gravity. The flags would not act as they would on
earth. That supposed anomaly fails to convince, but during Apollo 12 the solar wind trap bent
as though a breeze were hitting it. The Apollo 12 astronauts made note of it, and Houston put
forth the explanation that the solar wind did it.[58] The solar wind would have to be billions of
times stronger than it is to have bent the solar wind trap. NASA qualified its explanation and
ventured the theory that the difference in temperature between the sunlit and dark sides might
have done it, although it stopped when the astronauts tried photographing it. This anomaly
fails to convince.

The anomaly where shadows do not run in parallel lines.

There is no shadow analysis that is convincing regarding a moon hoax. If the only light source
on the moon was the sun, the theory goes that all shadows on the ground should have run
parallel to one another. One problem with shadow analysis is that uneven terrain can cause or
contribute to the apparent shadow discrepancies, and multiple light sources should throw
multiple shadows, which has never been seen in any of the anomalous lunar photos. So far,
no convincing evidence of this supposed anomaly exists.

The anomaly where astronauts standing in shadows are illuminated.

The theory regarding this anomaly is that in the vacuum of space (the moon has precious little
atmosphere), there is no atmospheric diffusion, and a shadow on the moon should be pitch
black. That should be true, except for two facts. The first is that a reflection of light from the
earth can put some light into the shadows, similar to moonshine except far more pronounced,
because the earth is much larger. But the sun is 100,000 times brighter than the earth from the
moon. That illumination would not be seen for the same reason that stars are rarely seen in
the Apollo moon photographs. The second is that if there were any illuminated surfaces with a
line of sight to the shadow, they would shine scattered light onto it. That second instance
explains every existing lit-in-the-shadows anomaly. Shadows that look gray have always had,
as far as the examples I have seen, something illuminated that had a line-of sight to it, usually
close-by. Much has been made of astronauts standing in the shadow of the LM (Landing
Module, also called Lunar Module), being lit up, or having a “hot spot” on their suits, which
supposedly shows a secondary light source, not the sun. Again, the scattering “backward” of
light from the surface onto an astronaut above the moon’s surface can explain every instance
of the astronaut being “lit up” while in shadow, and it is surprising that this “anomaly” has had
such a long life among the conspiracy theorists. The “hot spots” may have a similar
explanation.

No visible exhaust issued from the lunar landers’ rockets. The fact of no visible rocket
exhaust coming from the LMs when taking off is an impressive anomaly. Various explanations
have been posited over the years. One answer is that a rocket firing in a vacuum looks much
different from one firing in earth’s atmosphere. One debunker explanation is that in a vacuum,
the rocket exhaust stops igniting immediately after it leaves the nozzle, so the bright blast we
see in earth takeoffs is not there. Another explanation is that the video cameras during the
Apollo 15, 16 and 17 missions were so poor that they would not have picked up the flash very
well. Another explanation is that the takeoffs took place in the daytime, so it made the flame
less visible than if it took off at night. Yet another explanation is that the fuels used with the LM
did not produce a visible flame. All of those explanations may in fact help explain why there is
no visible exhaust coming from the LM, except for a brief flash at the beginning, known as an
“ignition transient.”

The fuels used on the Apollo Service Module, Landing Module and Space Shuttle stabilizer
rockets were similar. They were a combination of a hydrazine mixture and dinitrogen tetroxide,
or cousins of that combination. They are known as hypergolic fuels, because they need no
ignition to light. The chemicals are so reactive that they ignite by merely coming into contact
with each other. To clarify this, at this footnote is a little chemistry and rocketry narrative.[59]
The shuttle stabilizer rockets going off are in the vacuum of space, and are vastly smaller
explosions than the blast needed to take off from the moon (the shuttle stabilizer rockets were
less than a third as powerful as the LM ascent stage rocket). The fuels were slightly different,
though, which may account for the light coming from the shuttle stabilizer rockets and the
almost complete lack of light coming from the LM. See below some examples of NASA rockets
firing in space.
 Click on image to enlarge

On the poor video quality issue, it was definitely true on Apollo 11, and while the video quality
is less than superb for the Apollo 15, 16 and 17 liftoffs, it appears good enough to pick up the
flash, as for about a second, there is light seen below the nozzle, and it disappears before the
LM is ten feet into the “air.” The takeoff appears to kick up some dust, but after the first few
feet, there is no light of combustion seen, or ever any obvious exhaust. The best explanation
of the rocket exhaust issue is probably at Jay Windley’s Moon Base Clavius. He stated that
the invisible exhaust from the LM was not too surprising, but could even appear anomalous to
the expert, unless they did some homework. He performed considerable homework to make
his case. I am 95% convinced by his explanation.

There is no crater below the lunar landers.

Though there is no crater below the lunar landers visible in any lunar landing missions, in
some, a slight disturbance of dust can be seen. The reasons given by NASA and the
debunkers is that the engines were throttled down heavily by the astronauts, and a couple of
inches down the lunar dust gave way to virtual bedrock, which caused the astronauts many
problems, such as taking core samples and planting the flags. The explanations put forth by
NASA and the conspiracy debunkers are convincing.

The moon footage from Apollo 11 was of poor quality.

The moon video footage from the Apollo 11 landing was poor, extremely so. There has been
much writing on the development of the film used on the moon, and how it withstood the lunar
environment’s rigors to take those crystal clear photos we are all familiar with. On the Apollo
11 mission, a state-of-the-art color video camera was in the Command Module. On the moon it
was a black and white camera. Not only that, but television stations around the world did not
even get a feed of the footage, but had to film a screen provided by NASA. The press was
never allowed in the Mission Control Room until late in the Apollo program, when one press
representative was finally allowed into the viewing chamber, directly behind where my father
used to sit. It is odd to have sophisticated research and development devoted to the print film
and still cameras, but incredibly poor black-and-white live footage produced on the moon,
when a state-of-the-art color video camera was in the Command Module.

I am not completely satisfied with the explanations, although Jay Windley has done a
creditable job of explaining the technical issues and how NASA resolved them. That poor
quality Apollo 11 video footage is also where I hit my pay dirt.

The radiation problem.

Ralph René’s radiation analysis is not convincing. Even among the conspiracy debunkers, the
radiation issue looms largely, with even the most ardent debunkers admitting that NASA was
fortunate that a solar flare did not cook any astronauts. NASA stated that one astronaut had a
little radiation sickness during an Apollo mission, but it was later chalked up to what he ate.
Although the risk was supposedly low, the potential outcome was disastrous, and it makes one
wonder about NASA’s control over the dissemination of data regarding the missions, and why
they might have staged the moon landings. What kind of public relations disaster would it have
been for the world to watch astronauts being killed by radiation as they tried landing on the
moon, especially during the heat of the Cold War? Today, one of the greatest barriers to
attempting a manned mission to Mars is radiation. Astronauts going to Mars would be
exposed to solar flare risk far longer than the ten days or so that Apollo astronauts were
exposed, making the risk unacceptably high, and the radiation shielding needed to survive
solar flares would be much heavier than anything that has been officially into space so far.
Currently, it is one of the major limiting factors in extended manned missions in the solar
system. All the same, NASA assessed the radiation risk, and decided that it was low enough
to be acceptable, and they had astronomers carefully watching the sun before the Apollo
launches so they could cancel a mission if it seemed that the sun was about to belch out a
large solar flare.

The “crosshair” problem. The “crosshair” issue is where the reticles had objects
superimposed over them, which should be impossible, and is dealt with above.

Odd reflections. The issue of odd reflections deserves scrutiny, and the anomalies are
interesting. If the footage seemingly shot on the moon was really shot on earth in a set
environment, simulating the sun could have been difficult. If it was shot in a set environment,
reproducing the sun’s intensity may have required a spotlight larger than the sun appears from
the earth or moon. Reproducing a light appearing the same size as the sun would have
presented difficulties. One difficulty would be keeping the spotlight always the same distance
from the action in order to not appear the wrong size if seen. A relatively small distance
difference from the spotlight between “scenes” would make noticeable differences in the
“sun’s” apparent size. About the only equipment used during the moon landings that reflected
the sun, enabling the NASA cameras to pick it up, were helmet visors. The Apollo astronaut
helmets, and that of all NASA astronauts, had convex faceplates. Anything reflected in a
convex mirror would appear smaller than it would appear if seen directly. Look at your
reflection in the underside of a spoon to get the idea.

The problem with all the “is-it-fake-footage?” analysis is that the published NASA Apollo
footage is about the only data on what lunar conditions would look like. The Soviet Union took
many thousands of images with its probes, and looks similar to the Apollo missions, but those
images are also not easily available. Try to find any of them on the Internet. I found one, after
lengthy searching. My local library, the King County library system (the second busiest in the
nation, with heavy contributions from Bill Gates and friends) does not have anything on the
Soviet moon probe images. One can special order some books, and that is about it. If
somebody has nothing to compare it to, how can they tell if it is fake? That cloud hangs over
all of the moon footage analysis, both pro and con. The readily available Soviet images,
however, look similar to the Apollo images. There are some common aspects of what
supposedly happened on the moon and other NASA missions. The rocket exhaust issue is
one where we can compare the footage to other NASA missions, because the surface of the
moon and the space above earth, where astronauts orbit, are both near-vacuums, but with
different fuels and other parameters, the comparisons still have problems.

In the lunar jump image below, images are presented of the sun as reflected in the visors of
astronauts during two lunar missions: Apollo 14 and 17. The Apollo 14 image is how most of
them appear, with the sun rather small in the faceplate. However, quite a few images, as with
that one from Apollo 17, have been produced. See how large the sun’s image is. Many moon
hoax theorists have used that anomaly as evidence of fakery, where the “sun” was far closer to
the astronaut than 93 million miles. It had me wondering about it for a long time, and I
amassed many visor images from lunar photos and footage. However, as Jay Windley and his
fellow debunkers explained one day, every one of the “small” images were taken with still film,
and all the large images are from video footage. That could lend evidence to the theory that
the still images and video footage were taken in different sessions, but I believe the likeliest
answer has to do with the vagaries of video cameras, especially those early ones, and the
sun’s brilliance. The sun’s reflection “overexposed” in the video footage, making the reflection
appear larger than it really was. That phenomenon can be easily seen in today’s video
cameras, if they try directly recording the sun. I consider that anomaly adequately explained
by the differences between video and still photography.

There is another reflection anomaly that the Dark Moon authors brought up, but it is not as big
an anomaly as they say. More evidence that the debunkers use to make the case that the
Apollo landings were real events is that the Apollo astronauts put laser reflectors on the moon
during their missions, and astronomers have been bouncing lasers off of them ever since. The
authors of Dark Moon use the fact that the Apollo 11 reflector was 28° from horizontal, and that
the Apollo 11 landed about at the lunar equator, so the reflector could not have reflected a
laser back at the earth.[60] Their argument is flawed, because it is a three-dimensional issue,
not a two-dimensional one. If the landing site were at the equator and in the center of the
moon, as seen from earth, then their argument would hold. However, the Apollo 11 landing
site was 23.63° (according to NASA) from the center of the moon, as one moves “eastward”
along the equator. Think of it as 23.63° of longitude, not latitude. Then the angle of the
reflector makes more sense, although there is sill a discrepancy of a few degrees, if the
reflector was aligned properly. In looking at the landing site layout and a picture of the reflector
with the flag behind it, it appears to be tilted in the general direction of where it should be. It is
one more example of the flawed work that the Apollo conspiracy theorists have put forth. The
Dark Moon authors brought up other problems with the reflector issue, but when they
exaggerated the problem with the reflector-angle issue, it weakened their argument. To their
credit however, they bring up the issue that the reflector was only placed 40 feet from the LM in
one official account, while other accounts have placed it at different distances.

Those kinds of discrepancies abound with NASA, which is partly why it earned the nickname,
Never A Straight Answer. It was claimed that earth-based lasers were hitting the reflector
immediately after Armstrong set it up. Another account contradicted that notion, because the
lasers apparently will not return a good enough signal during the lunar day. Even stranger, a
laser aimed at the moon can return enough of a signal that a reflector is not even needed.
According to the official explanation, of about one sextillion photons fired by an earth-based
laser at the reflector in a burst, one photon will make it back to be recorded in the collector on
earth. In 1962, scientists bounced lasers off the moon and caught the signal coming back.[61]
Apparently however, the signal strength back from lasers aimed at the reflectors on the moon
is about a hundred times greater than areas of the moon without reflectors.

People who might have talked died under mysterious circumstances. The issue of
mysterious and untimely deaths also plagues the moon shots. Were whistleblowers silenced?
The January 1967 death of Gus Grissom, along with Ed White and Roger Chaffee in the Apollo
1 fire, is a possibility. One of the more prominent debunkers of the “we-never-went-to-
the-moon” crowd has published his “disgust” that Bill Kaysing would suggest that Gus Grissom
was murdered in order to silence him. Who else makes such a “disgusting” claim? Grissom’s
wife and son do. They both believe that the Apollo 1 fire was no accident, and that the truth is
being covered up. They have evidence that such a notion might be true, and Grissom’s son
Scott is calling for an official investigation into the matter as of 2002. Grissom was critical of
NASA, hanging a lemon on a NASA simulator before he died. People associated with the
Apollo 1 simulation on the day of the fire remarked on the strange atmosphere that prevailed.
Grissom told his wife that if somebody died in an “accident,” it would likely be him, and not
because he was accident prone. Straight-talking Grissom apparently made the NASA brass
uneasy with his observations. During the Apollo 1 simulation, just before he died, the
communications with the Command Module completely broke down, and Grissom said in
exasperation, “How are we going to get to the moon if we can't talk between two buildings?”

Lola Morrow was the astronauts’ secretary. On the show Moon Shot she can be heard
describing the atmosphere on the morning of the fire. She described the mood of Grissom,
White and Chaffee as one she had never seen before. Before each flight and major event, the
astronauts were eager to get to it. Not that day. They obviously did not want to do the
simulation. Clark MacDonald, an engineer working for McDonnell-Douglas, was hired by
NASA to investigate the fire. He now has admitted that more than thirty years earlier, NASA
destroyed the evidence he gathered, as well as the report he produced, for “public relations”
reasons. MacDonald determined that an electrical short started the fire when the battery
power was switched on. Grissom’s son Scott was granted access to the Apollo 1 craft, where
he gathered evidence that he says pointed to sabotage, and that there has been a cover-up of
it.

Grissom’s death (taking White and Chaffee with him) is not the only strange one. Bill Kaysing
thinks that another man was silenced by murder. Thomas Baron was an inspector for North
American Rockwell, the contractor that built the Command Module. The astronauts are united
in the opinion that what Rockwell produced was of initially poor quality. The astronauts
comment on it in Moon Shot. Baron was not an engineer, and only had a high school
education, but was the detail-oriented fanatic that all technical organizations need. His pals
gave him the initials “DR,” which stood for discrepancy report. His supervisor ran out of
discrepancy report forms regularly, because Baron used so many of them. He was the
squeaky wheel. He made some of his findings public, and Rockwell fired him about three
weeks before the Apollo 1 fire. Baron originally produced a fifty-five-page report, and finished
a 500-page report that he delivered when he testified to Congress in April of 1967. His
testimony received a hostile reception. A few days later he was dead. His car was struck by a
train, killing not only himself, but also his wife and stepdaughter. In shades of Casolaro and
Wilcher, his death was officially ruled a suicide. It was worse than that, because he did not
only “kill” himself, but also murdered his wife and her child. It took some interesting
psychology to arrive at that conclusion, going from being overly conscientious to becoming a
murderer. One theory is that he was distraught over the Apollo 1 fire, so he killed himself and
his family. I have not heard about anybody else connected to the Apollo program killing
themselves or becoming murderers over the Apollo 1 “accident.” How strange that the biggest
whistleblower did. Just what are those odds? The 500-page report disappeared, and has not
been seen since. The moon hoax debunkers have lined up behind the official explanation.
Jay Windley thinks that Baron's report has come up missing partly because it had little
investigative value, and that Baron may have indeed killed himself, but if he were murdered, it
would have been a private contractor, not NASA, and if they wanted to silence him, they should
have done it before he testified. Jay may be right, but I have encountered far too many
conveniently timed deaths during my investigations to make my suspicion go away, especially
when Grissom’s son thinks he was murdered.

Killing whistleblowers such as Thomas Baron was standard operating procedure for the
defense establishment, if it related to military matters. I know people who have been involved
in Department of Defense whistle-blowing activities. It could get pretty scary. Sometimes,
people would simply “disappear,” Jimmy Hoffa-style. When billions of dollars are at stake,
murdering a few people with “big mouths” or who otherwise stand in the way is standard
activity. That is the nature of American-style capitalism. Why should it be different regarding
space matters? I was challenged to provide some evidence of what I know about whistle-
blowers, and without naming names, this footnote presents a little of what I am aware of.[62]

James Irwin was an Apollo 15 astronaut. He became a Born Again Christian, leading an effort
to find Noah’s Ark. According to what I have read and heard, in 1991, Irwin contacted Kaysing
to have a chat. Why would Irwin call a “kook” such as Kaysing? Four days after allegedly
trying to contact Kaysing, Irwin was dead from a heart attack. Did “Born Again” Irwin want to
unburden his conscience? Irwin had heart disease, so that may explain it, but the spooks can
apparently induce heart attacks using normally undetectable means.

The lack of athletic feats performed on the moon. Before the Apollo program, there were
many predictions of what conditions would be encountered in one-sixth gravity. Many athletic
feats were predicted, such as running with 14-foot strides, and feats that acrobats could only
dream of. That kind of speculation was not from the 1800s, but in the November 1967 issue of
Science Digest. Even in 1969, such predictions were being made. No feats were recorded of
that nature during the Apollo missions. Every explanation for that lack of performance has
been marginally valid. Jay Windley and I discovered what I consider undeniable evidence of a
remarkable feat performed that does preclude earth gravity, and it was done on the very first
lunar mission, Apollo 11. Millions of people saw it live back in 1969, including me, but it has
been an unknown event in all the debates on the issue during the past ten years. The
evidence was sitting under everybody’s nose, but until now, nobody has brought it up.

The explanations for the lack of feats have centered around: how heavy and restrictive the
suits were; how dangerous it would have been to attempt any feats; the feats that were
performed were spectacular under the conditions; and the astronauts were too busy doing
important things to bother with athletic feats; and there were feats, but they were not filmed.

The heavy and restrictive suit issue is pertinent. International Latex Corporation (ILC) made
the suits that the Apollo astronauts wore. Hamilton Standard made the portable life support
system (PLSS), which was the “backpack.” There was fierce competition among various
companies to provide the suits and backpacks. ILC produced the A7L model of its suit, which
NASA bought. To test their A7L suit, they had a technician get onto a football field with it and
run, fall, catch footballs and throw them.[63] NASA was an easy sell after that demonstration.
The A7L suit was worn on all the Apollo missions up to Apollo 14. For the last three Apollo
missions, the A7LB suit was used, which was even more flexible than the A7L suit. In 1968,
Hamilton Standard demonstrated a suit that had a 93% of nude range of motion, which even
those who saw the demonstration found hard to believe.[64] The A7LB suit allowed the
astronauts to bend over, touch the ground and sit in the Lunar Rover. The Apollo 16 suit even
had improved flexibility over the Apollo 15 suit.[65]

There have been numerous misrepresentations of the space suits’ weight. The A7L and PLSS
weighed about 180 pounds on earth, according to NASA. A fully loaded A7LB with PLSS
weighed 212 earth pounds.[66] A 180-pound astronaut with an A7LB on theoretically weighed
392 pounds on earth, or about 65 moon pounds, or about one-third of his earth weight. To gain
an idea of what an advantage that would be, try walking around carrying somebody of about
your weight on your back, in piggyback fashion. See how long you can walk around. Then
imagine carrying around somebody that weighs twice what you do. You would probably
collapse. Then imagine the difference between carrying twice your own weight versus having
no burden at all. The astronauts experienced that difference in the other direction. Weighing
one-third of their earth weight would have made them feel as if they were floating. During the
Apollo missions, the astronauts showed how flexible and tough their suits were, and took many
spills and tumbles on the moon.

The astronauts were fiercely competitive. See Moon Shot for the athletic competitions that the
Mercury astronauts had with each other, such as water skiing. The astronauts competed
against each other, to see who could land closest to the planned landing site. Their
competitiveness permeated the entire astronaut program. Until I hit pay dirt, the most
spectacular feat performed during the Apollo missions was John Young’s Jump-Salute feat.
Charles Duke had him jump next to the American flag, and Young whipped off a snappy salute
in mid-vacuum. Until now, it was considered the greatest athletic feat that any Apollo astronaut
ever displayed on the moon, and nearly 20 years ago William Brian made it a subject of
analysis. The image below shows the analysis.

Click on image to enlarge

The debunkers and mainstream media have misrepresented the jumps that Young made.
Mainstream captions have stated that he got three feet off the ground, and his leaps have been
compared to Michael Jordan’s feats. Neither claim is close to the truth. First of all, the leaps
Young made got him eighteen inches off the ground, and the image shows how it is easily
measured. A standing jump does not take much flexibility. I got about 27 inches off the ground
with a standing leap when I was a young man. Eighteen inches is normal for an athletic man
under forty years old. All a man needs to do is swing his arms and bend his knees (bending
the knees is more important), something easily accomplished in the A7LB suits. Also
presented in that above image are video captures of Young’s leap. He bent his knees and
lowered and raised his arms nearly as a normal earthman would. The official NASA site says
that Young barely had to flex his knees to attain his jump. About that same flex is what a man
would do for a standing leap on earth. The astronauts would have weighed about one-third of
their earth weight in their suits on the moon. However, they would have gotten more than three
times as high because it is the velocity at which they leave the ground that determines the
leap’s height. Because they would have felt so much lighter, they could have jumped more
quickly, their leg muscles not burdened as much. The suits would have been somewhat
restrictive, but in the Apollo footage, especially the footage from the last three missions, those
astronauts moved easily, and their suits did not appear to hinder their movements much at all,
especially for the relatively modest flexibility required for a standing leap.
William Brian calculated that a suited astronaut would have attained more than four times the
height in a moon jump as an earth jump.[67] Brian also doubted the 185-pound space suit
weight, because the astronauts performed full-suit simulations in the Oregon desert. It is
difficult to imagine walking around and performing duties while wearing a suit that weighed as
much as the person did. Brian thought the suits might really have weighed on the order of
seventy pounds on earth, which is doubtful, but an understandable suspicion.[68] Young’s
effort was the equivalent of less than a five-inch leap. My grandmother could have done that.
It takes more energy to jump up one stair on a staircase. That was the greatest athletic feat
ever recorded on the moon. Not much of a performance, for those fiercely competitive and
athletic astronauts. In most matters as these, NASA speaks with more than one voice, and
they contradict each other. On NASA’s site, the description of the jump says it required little
effort to attain. Other NASA people have explained the modest altitude attained as due to the
restrictive suits. It appears as if Young did not exert himself much to make the jump,
particularly as he performed two jumps, back-to-back.

A prominent conspiracy theory is that the astronauts’ activities on the moon were staged on
earth, and games with the film speed, hidden wires and other tricks were used to simulate the
moon’s low gravity environment. Some of the footage, if played at twice “normal” speed, looks
similar to earth-bound footage. The debunkers counter that not all footage looks earthbound at
double speed, such as the Rover footage. It is plausible that only the footage of the astronauts
moving around would have the speed altered, where footage such as the Rover driving would
not. Until I hit “pay dirt,” I was skeptical of the lack of any athletic feat that obviously precluded
an earth-gravity environment.

The Nazi connection. Henry Ford and the Rockefeller family had close ties with Nazi
Germany, helping to build their war machine. As the war ended in Europe in 1945, United
States and Soviet Union descended on to the V-2 rocket works. They both grabbed as many
German scientists as possible. American space heroes such as Werner von Braun, Walter
Dornberger and Arthur Rudolf came from the V-2 program (the “V” in V-2 stood for “vengeance
weapon”). The United States also hired the Nazi intelligence network, nearly in its entirety, and
built the CIA on it. The rationale was that the Nazis knew more about the Soviet Union than
anybody else, so intelligence agents such as Reinhard Gehlen would be useful. Nazi spies
helped initiate the Cold War, as they lied to the Americans about the Soviet Union's capabilities
and intentions. The Nazis were largely playing the Americans as chumps.

Operation Overcast and Operation Paperclip were secret programs that the U.S. ran to bring in
useful Germans, and von Braun came to America that way. Von Braun was an SS man and
was present at such infamous concentration camps as Dora, Nordhausen and Buchenwald,
where hundreds of Allied prisoners of war was well as Jews were tortured, worked to death
and experimented on. He handpicked inmates from Buchenwald to become slaves at the
rocket works.[69]

Launching V-2 missiles at London was not the only goal of the Nazi Rocketeers. When the war
ended, they were experimenting with an “American” missile, which they could launch from
Germany that would drop a payload on New York City. There are instances of Nazis
performing human experiments at the death camps, and going on the U.S. payroll weeks
later.[70] Some of the worst Nazi businessmen (Karl Blessing, for instance) were quickly
“rehabilitated” by Allen Dulles of the CIA and placed right back into the positions of power they
enjoyed while being ardent supporters of Hitler’s regime.[71]
Another Nazi scientist who became an American space hero was Dr. Hubertus Strughold, later
called “the father of U.S. space medicine.” He had a long and distinguished career at NASA an
even had an American library named after him. He ran a facility at Dachau where medical
experiments were carried out on prisoners and he even had a traveling laboratory, going from
camp to camp. He came over in Operation Paperclip. One area of Strughold’s research was a
precursor to the CIA’s MK-ULTRA mind control experiments, where drugs were used on
prisoners. But the Nazi-NASA connection that relates to my Apollo program concerns is the
Nazi penchant for fabrication and deceit, and the Hollywood connection. Fritz Lang was the
legendary German filmmaker who created Metropolis and the more obscure Frau im Mond,
which translates to “woman on the moon.” Hermann Oberth, considered the “Father of the
Space Age,” was the technical consultant on rocketry in the film.[72] They filmed a dummy
rocket being dropped down a chimney, then ran the footage in reverse, creating the illusion of
a rocket taking off. They created a promotional film that combined footage from real tests with
Lang’s film, passing off the whole thing as a documentary. When they finally got a rocket to fly
as it should, von Braun took that footage, combined cartoon footage with it, and produced a
movie extravaganza that gulled a skeptical Hitler in 1943. Hitler was so impressed that he
bestowed a professorship on von Braun and devoted all possible effort into developing the
V-2. They failed to tell Hitler that nearly all their rocket launches were still failing.

The Gestapo confiscated Lang's models for his film. The situation is similar to what conspiracy
theorists think may have been the dynamics surrounding the Apollo missions. I believe that
the FBI and CIA investigated the Apollo 1 fire and the FBI destroyed all blueprints of the Apollo
spacecraft and Saturn rockets.

One of the U.S. government's more reliable studios in the war effort was Disney Studios.
During World War II, Disney received up to 90% of its money from federal contracts, and
produced many military training and propaganda films. Donald Duck went to war. Walt Disney
was a social Darwinist and anti-communist crusader, heartily approving of the McCarthy witch
hunts, appearing as a friendly witness during the Un-American hearings and fervently
endorsing the Hollywood blacklist. Years before the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, von Braun
worked closely with Disney Studios, even directing the animators and designing Disneyland’s
Tomorrowland ride called Rocket to the Moon. Also, von Braun hosted the Disney show Man
in Space. His co-host was Heinz Haber, another NASA Nazi. Haber worked for Strughold and
co-authored papers that were based on human experiments performed at Dachau and other
concentration camps. Prisoners surviving the experiments were generally killed, then
dissected.[73] When the Eisenhower administration asked Disney to produce a propaganda
film regarding the peaceful uses of nuclear energy, Haber was picked to host the Disney show,
“Our Friend the Atom.” Haber then wrote a popular children’s book of the same title. I knew
about the CIA and NASA Nazis, but I never thought I would read about the Disney Nazis.

In short, Nazi expertise and propaganda in faking film footage has been so inextricably
involved with NASA that is not inconceivable that such expertise was employed during the
Apollo missions.

The military-industrial complex connection. The Nazi connection is intertwined with the
U.S. military connection. The military was deeply involved with NASA, as were the Nazi
scientists. In the 1958 law that created NASA, it is described as a “defense” organization. The
NSA (National Security Agency) is the military version of the CIA, at least in theory. All the
astronauts through the Apollo program had military backgrounds. Virtually all the contractors
that built NASA's equipment were military contractors, deeply involved in both the space and
arms races. The very companies that produced an amazing array of inferior products for the
military, while vastly overcharging for them, supposedly were the same companies that made
all that equipment that performed so flawlessly during Apollo missions.

The Air Force has openly admitted that is developing an offensive military capability in space.
The Star Wars program is part of it. Here is a quote from the Commander-in-chief of the U.S.
Space Command, Joseph Ashy:

“Some people don't want to hear this, and it sure isn't in vogue, but - absolutely - we’re going to
fight in space. We’re going to fight from space and were going to fight into space… we will
engage terrestrial targets some day - ships, airplanes, land targets - from space.”

Here is something from an Air Force publication in 1996,

“In the next two decades, new technologies will allow the fielding of space-based weapons of
devastating effectiveness to be used to deliver energy and mass as force projection in tactical
and strategic conflict…These advances will enable lasers with reasonable mass and cost to
affect very many kills.”

Here is an Air Force official talking about our space dominance, “With regard to space
dominance, we have it, we like it and we’re going to keep it.”[74] As Noam Chomsky made
clear in his summer 2001 article “Hegemony or Survival” regarding the Bush administration's
push for a satellite based missile shield system, the nations that topped a list of potential future
victims of U.S. international violence consider the Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) system as
an offensive, not defensive weapon. The BMD system would further remove the ability of any
nation to directly respond to U.S.-inflicted violence. It would be far easier to sneak a nuclear,
chemical or biological weapon in four major cities then launch a missile, with its “return
address” on it. If our survival instead of hegemony was the overriding goal, and if containing
the spread of weapons to “rogue states” and “terrorists” was truly the U.S. goal, it would not
plan on devoting more than 1000 times more money to the Star Wars program than trying to
keep the ex-Soviet Union's nuclear weapons from falling into the “wrong hands.” In the wake
of the World Trade Center attacks of September 2001, the basic strategy still has not appeared
to change.

In reality, the military domination of space is a logical extension of Britain having the world's
most powerful navy, U.S. building forts in Indian country, and other imperial actions designed to
violently protect their interests. The latest version of Star Wars will only make other nations
more eager to get better weapons. They do not want to be on the receiving end of U.S.
violence, and nuclear weapons are seen is a deterrent, as the U.S. will not pick on nations that
can strike back. It is the timeless story of trying to make better weapons than one's enemy.
The U.S. attempt to militarize space renders the controversy around the moon landings a
meaningless footnote.
The moon missions were relatively hitchless. The relatively hitchless nature of the Apollo
missions, and events that seem to be the product of bad script writing, can seem odd. The
history of NASA is filled with spectacular failures. The Ranger program was the first U.S.
program to try landing on the moon. There were nine Ranger missions. The Ranger probes
were supposed to go to the moon and crash into it, sending back data as it flew into the moon.
The first six missions were all failures, and by Ranger 7, NASA abandoned the goal of
successfully crashing into the moon. The Ranger 7 mission was launched in July 1964. The
Ranger program followed the unsuccessful Pioneer program launches. The first five Pioneer
launches, beginning in 1958, were failures. The sixth Pioneer mission (March 1960, called
Pioneer 5) was successful, and was followed by two failed missions. Meanwhile in the Soviet
Union, a lunar flyby, returning pictures of the far side of the moon, was achieved on the Luna 3
mission in 1959. The Soviet Union did not send another mission toward the moon for the next
four years. The official story is that they were developing their new, larger booster, enabling
greater payloads, although there is other speculation about the true reason for the four-year
lag. In 1964, the Soviet Union attempted a soft landing on the moon with its Luna 5. It created
a lunar crater as it landed at full speed. Luna 6 failed, and Luna 7 also failed to soft land on
the moon. Luna 8 also crashed. Luna 9 made a successful lunar soft landing on February 3,
1966. It was the first soft-landing ever made on the moon.

The United States soft-landed the Surveyor 1 on the moon on June 2, 1966. Surveyor 2
crashed into the moon. Surveyor 3 had a strange landing. It bounced 35 feet above the moon
when it landed because its rockets kept firing. Surveyor 4 failed, completely “disappearing” 2.5
minutes before touchdown. NASA never figured out what happened. Surveyor 5 nearly failed
due to a helium leak, but a jury-rigged landing saved the mission. Surveyor 6 was the first craft
to lift off from the moon. It did its takeoff maneuver (getting about 12 feet into the “air”) at the
time of the Apollo 4 mission, in November 1967. Until Apollo 11, that was the only test in
taking off.

Apollo 4 was unmanned, as all the Apollo launches would be through Apollo 6, because of the
Apollo 1 disaster. Apollo 4 was also the first time that the Saturn V rocket was launched, which
powered the manned Apollo missions. Apollo 5 used the Saturn 1B rocket, and that mission
supposedly tested the LM in earth orbit, and the mission was completely run by remote
control. Could they have sent unmanned Apollo missions to the moon? Apollo 6 was a
demonstration of that possibility. It was the second launch of the Saturn V rocket, and the goal
was to simulate the events needed to send the craft to the moon, and “man rate” the Apollo V
rocket. The mission had twenty major failures, and it did not even attain the proper orbit, and
the third stage burn that was supposed to send the astronauts to the moon failed to ignite. Not
exactly a great record of success to build on to go the moon by 1970. The Apollo 6 mission
was launched in April 1968, less than two years before Kennedy’s announced deadline. The
official story is that von Braun and all of NASA pulled together and performed technical
wizardry that is still hard to believe today, even by those who participated in it.

My father left NASA after the Apollo 1 fire because the environment at NASA became, in his
words, “hyper-political,” with everybody trying to cover their backsides and pointing the finger
at everybody else. That was not exactly an environment conducive to making the biggest
technical achievement in history. Apollo 7 was the first manned Apollo mission, and it did not
use the Saturn V rocket. The mission was nearly perfect, as were the next five manned Apollo
missions. One reason for the vastly lower failure rate for the manned missions was that the
precautions, effort expended and expense was far greater in launching human beings into
space than hunks of lifeless metal. All those unmanned Apollo launches were due to a
disaster on the ground that killed three men. Also, the most sophisticated piece of technology
known to man, the human being, was part of the manned missions. Astronauts were
continually solving problems during the missions. Humans are also the most error-prone piece
of equipment that went to the moon, but the flexibility and problem-solving features apparently
outweighed the errors. The satellites and probes of the day had limited problem-solving ability,
and the remote control solutions had dimmer prospects than if a human being was on the
scene.

The Landing Module was never tested in a “real” landing and takeoff situation until Armstrong
and Aldrin supposedly landed on the moon and took off. When Armstrong tried flying a
stripped down version of the LM on earth, he crashed it, nearly getting killed. The LM
supposedly made six perfect landings and take offs from the moon.

Apollo 10 was the closest thing there was to a “live” test of the LM before landing on the
moon. After the LM descended and was getting ready to ascend, it began spinning wildly, and
its pilot, Eugene Cernan, thought it was going to crash. He got it under control and made it
back to the Command Module. The official reason for that near-disaster is that an abort switch
had been incorrectly set because of an error in the manual they used. That explanation shows
how vulnerable the missions were to human error, but according to NASA, human error was
minimal during the Apollo missions.

O’Leary was skeptical about the Apollo missions, and his skepticism was precisely where mine
has been: the moon landings themselves. The LM had virtually no testing in the environment
where it would be used, and the scariest parts of all, the lunar landing and ascent, had no live
testing whatsoever before Armstrong and Aldrin supposedly landed and took off from the
moon. The LM had to come in sideways, and its rockets to fire perfectly to make a horizontal
landing on the moon. Nothing like it in manned space flight has been done before or since,
and it was done without having been properly tested in a real environment before the Apollo 11
Mission. In kind, it is a situation similar to NASA never sending an animal beyond the Van
Allen belt to test the radiation of space’s effects on living creatures before it sent men out
there. Just before the Apollo 11 mission, NASA sent a monkey into earth orbit, to spend thirty
days there. The monkey died in a week and the capsule was brought down on July 6, 1969.

If we really landed men on the moon, those astronauts were relatively expendable assets,
which their military backgrounds prepared them for. The landing burn was remarkable, never
having been tried in a live environment before people risked their lives doing it. Jay Windley
informed me that the LM landing burn was relatively easy because there was no atmosphere to
contend with. That is true that it would have been easier than an earth landing, but the “flying
bedstead” was the only thing used to train for landing on the moon, and they did not do a
sideways braking burn to quickly rotate for a vertical landing. They also trained in a stationary
LM. NASA held its collective breath as Apollo 11 landed on the moon.

In Dark Moon, a series of images depicted the Surveyor 3 as Apollo 12 was landing (p. 160). I
had my doubts we were seeing genuine footage taken by the LM in Dark Moon, and everybody
knowledgeable I have asked about those pictures states that it is not genuine footage. At this
time, the burden of proof is on the Dark Moon authors to prove it is genuine Surveyor 3
footage, and I think they have presented faulty information.
I understand why conspiracy theorists have doubts about the moon landings’ authenticity. I am
not saying they are right, but their doubts are understandable. Apollo 12 supposedly made a
pinpoint landing to be near Surveyor 3. Pinpoint is right, even though the lunar dust blinded
them as they landed. They also may have landed several feet from their deaths. They landed
so near the crater where Surveyor 3 was, that a few feet further would have landed two of the
LM’s legs into the crater, which could have possibly made a tragic end to the Apollo program.
The LM was designed to be positioned no more than 6 degrees from a vertical orientation. It
appears that the crater slope had more than a 6-degree slope to it, and appears that as few as
ten feet further toward the crater would have had the LM at greater than a 6-degree angle, and
they may not have been able to take off. I have not done the work to prove it, but the terrain at
the crater’s lip appears to be greater than a six-degree slope.

Click on image to enlarge

Another issue regarding the lunar missions was that the re-entry to earth on return from the
moon was a maneuver virtually never attempted before. It was extremely dangerous, with a
small margin of error. NASA never performed an unmanned test of that maneuver either,
except a jury-rigged simulation to try salvaging the failed Apollo 6 mission, which did not quite
attain the velocity of a return-from-the-moon situation. In those early days of NASA, with
animals going into space long before humans, and the incessant ground-based testing, they
never made a “real world” test of that re-entry, nor the lunar landing, nor taking off from the
moon. They could have tested those maneuvers with smaller and less costly unmanned craft.
At the time of Apollo 11, the Soviet Union tried sending an unmanned probe to the moon, Luna
15, to bring back moon rocks. Officially, the effort failed (the Dark Moon authors theorize that
Luna 15 brought back the Apollo 11 moon rocks). The Soviet Union successfully returned from
the lunar surface with Luna 16 in September 1970, with retrieved moon dust.

At best, giving NASA every benefit of the doubt, it was an extremely hazardous undertaking,
with numerous untested, little tested, or poorly tested maneuvers, to land on the moon before
1970. John Glenn was genuinely afraid of the risks associated with landing on the moon. My
father told me that Glenn was asked if he wanted to be the first man on the moon. Glenn
replied that he would not mind being the first man safely back from the moon.

It is interesting to see how NASA spun the missions and tests. NASA pronounced the Apollo 6
Mission a success, with nearly all mission objectives achieved. There were many design
problems with the LM, and many test failures. The unmanned LM1 test on earth apparently
was a disaster. The Ascent Propulsion System blew apart and caught on fire when tested, and
it malfunctioned on the second test, sending the LM into a tumble. The next LM they tested
was the LM3, which flew with Apollo 9. The conspiracy debunkers say that practice makes
perfect, but when the LM4 on Apollo 10 spun wildly while supposedly above the lunar surface
because a switch was thrown incorrectly, it had to make the Apollo 11 landing a breath-holding
event. It is awesome to consider all the things that had to go right on a lunar mission.

NASA called the LM a “skittish” craft mere months before the Apollo 11 mission. To date, a
successful landing rocket for earth conditions has never been developed. In the 1990s, the
DC-X rocket was tested. It took off and landed vertically. After several successful test flights,
the DC-X program was abandoned after the rocket tipped over and exploded during a test in
1996. Part of the reason we have no landing rockets is the earth’s atmosphere and higher
gravity, but it is another issue that brings up skepticism in the moon hoaxers’ minds.

Beginning with Apollo 11, the rest of the Apollo program went nearly flawlessly…all except for
Apollo 13, which appears to be bad script writing. One strange connection with the Apollo
program was Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. It was released during our big push
for the moon, in 1968. Arthur C. Clarke, the author of 2001, was not a mere science fiction
author. He is an astronomer and space expert. His name comes up regularly in the official
histories of space exploration.[75] He was the first person to describe a geo-synchronous
orbit, in 1945. He was a technical contributor to the space effort, a Jules Verne-like visionary.
The plot of 2001 revolves around covering up a discovery on the moon and the errant
computer HAL. HAL utters a famous line, ”Sorry to interrupt the festivities, but we have a
problem.” For lucky number Apollo 13, launched at 13:13 military time, with a date whose
digits add up to 13 (4/11/70), James Lovell, the mission commander, picked the name of the
command module: Odyssey. On the way to the moon, as they signed off for the night, they
played a tape of Also Sprach Zarathustra, the famous theme song from 2001. A few minutes
later, they had their famous accident. What did they tell NASA? “Houston, we’ve had a
problem.” Was that another strange set of coincidences, or rather unimaginative script
writing? Maybe it was synchronicity, or Lovell’s fascination with 2001. These speculations
touch on other conspiratorial musings made by the Dark Moon authors and others, such as
Richard Hoagland’s gang. All the 13s associated with Apollo 13 could be part of a conscious
numerological staging of events. Hoagland and Bara have been showing for years how NASA
events are timed to coincide with significant alignments in the stars and planets. Buzz Aldrin is
rd
a 33 degree Mason, and there is a whole body of conspiracy lore that includes the Masons,
rd
especially those at the 33 level.

The official Apollo 13 story is that an oxygen tank exploded in the Service Module. The tank
likely had a fire inside it, and then ruptured. Very near to it were liquid hydrogen tanks. The
oxygen tank was at about 1000 PSI pressure when it ruptured. If a hydrogen tank also
ruptured, or the nearby hypergolic fuel tanks, Apollo 13 would have become a fireball. As it
was, it blew off the side of the command module and created a leak in the other oxygen tank
that soon killed the Service Module. If any event during the Apollo program was seemingly
influenced by divine providence, the relatively gentle explosion of that oxygen tank was
probably it. A tank holding hundreds of pounds of liquid oxygen, exploding at 1000 PSI,
sounds scary.

How did NASA resolve that problem of the blast’s effect? The official story is that Apollo 13
made it back to earth by an amazing feat of jury-rigging. They used the LM rockets, as the
Service Module was dead, they created a contraption to remove their carbon dioxide from the
air, and they used admittedly “primitive” means to determine where they were and point the
ship in the right direction to get home safely. It was high drama that kept the world on the edge
of its seat. The Apollo missions became old news by Apollo 12, and Apollo 13 put Apollo back
in the headlines. The timing was fortuitous. When Ron Howard’s movie on Apollo 13 came
out on 1994, instead of the Zarathustra music, they played other music. Why? For a movie
that purported to tell the real story, why change the real music which was played?

There are “reasonable” explanations for those strange events, but there are issues with the
Apollo 13 mission that will not go away easily. People involved with Apollo 13 have written as
if there was divine providence or other strangeness happening. Apollo 13’s alarm system
engineer, Jerry Woodfill, has posted his account to the Internet, where he states that the Apollo
13 drama seemed to be guided by an “unrehearsed script,” and the Apollo 13 drama led him to
finding God and religion. NASA sent Arthur C. Clark a report on Apollo 13, and a NASA
administrator wrote on it, “Just as you always said it would be.” If there was not something
funny going on there, it can make one start believing in strange coincidence. Jim Lovell was
also on Apollo 8, and the crew later told Clarke that they were tempted to report sighting a
large black monolith on the far side of the moon. Instead, they read from the book of Genesis
and Lovell announced that there was a Santa Claus. Is that funny, or “funny?”

There are a number of video shots from the Apollo 13 mission, when they are supposedly well
beyond earth orbit, and blue can be seen through the windows of the Apollo 13 craft. The
conspiracy theorists believe we should see blue through the windows when the earth is below
the window. How can that be? For Apollo 11, there are similar shots. Here are some of those
frames.

Click on image to enlarge

As discussed below, I satisfied myself that the Apollo 11 photographs taken on the way to the
moon are genuine. One “reasonable” answer has been that ice crystals caused the blue color.
Another is that the windows’ coating did it. Could be.

The Apollo 13 drama supposedly showed what great problem solvers NASA was. Here is an
anecdote that my father told me many years ago, regarding what great problem solvers the
Mission Control boys were. A common phenomenon regarding technical efforts such as the
space program is that flying was not just what the astronauts did. Most people in the Mission
Control Room were avid amateur aeronauts. They either flew private planes, were ex-fighter
pilots such as Gene Kranz, or they were "nerds" who flew model airplanes, balloons and model
blimps. One day at the water cooler, the amateur model balloonists were talking about their
blimps and balloons, and how high they could go. They were having a lively conversation
about how they could get their blimps and dirigibles to go higher. They decided that if they
could somehow increase the air pressure in the balloons, they could accomplish their goal.
They were brainstorming on how to get increased pressure in the blimps. My father walked by
and took in their conversation. It is elementary physics that increasing the pressure in a blimp
would increase its weight, thus make it denser, not lighter. Increasing the pressure would
make the blimp sink, not go higher. My father listened to their conversation in amazement, and
butted in. He asked them to remember Archimedes and why things float. He said that their
brainstorming was going in the opposite direction of making their blimps to go higher. They
looked at my father as if he were crazy. As he told me that story many years ago, he said in
awe, "And those people put men on the moon!" That may not lend much evidence to the
"faking it" hypothesis, but is an example of some pretty poor problem solving. The “problem
solving” that happened on the Apollo 13 mission was orders of magnitude more difficult than
that. That kind of thoughtless behavior displayed at the water cooler is common with scientists
too. It is called “forgetting the basics.”
Faked photographs. Beginning with Bill Kaysing and continuing through virtually every moon
hoax theorist since, faked photographs are cornerstones of their arguments. If NASA faked the
moon landings, then the images returned would obviously have to be fabricated. There have
been times when I thought I found fabricated or altered images, as have many people who
looked at the data. I have looked at this area of evidence at great length. With some minor
possible exceptions, I have not seen any supposed image fabrication/alteration that has held
up to scrutiny, especially regarding the notion that it was consciously done to misrepresent the
reality of the moon landings. The shadow-angle analyses, the astronauts lit in the shadows,
the disappearing reticles, the lack of stars, the anomalous reflections, the seeming
discrepancies between video and still images, and all the rest, do not stand up to scrutiny, as
far as it lending evidence to the faked landing hypothesis. There are a number of reasons for
this whole “faked image” cottage industry that has developed. One is that we have nothing to
compare lunar images to. We do not live in the lunar environment, and the moon was the first
extraterrestrial body we visited. Of course it would look different from earth. There were plenty
of artistic conceptions through the ages of how the moon’s surface would appear up close, and
a gallery of artist’s conceptions of the lunar surface over the ages would look pretty funny
today, if compared to NASA’s lunar images.

I have some areas of professional expertise, mainly with the design and management of
information systems, as well as presenting data from them. One axiom of my profession is that
those who are not trained in the art of data management, and end up dealing with the
outputted data and making decisions from them, often know just enough to be dangerous
(often to themselves), and I have ruefully discovered that they cannot be trusted to assess the
data on their own, but need to be guided through it, at best. I think that a similar phenomenon
relates to the moon images. Most people who have asserted the “faked image” hypothesis for
the moon landings are not trained in photography or image analysis. I barely know the
rudiments myself. We can get into trouble when diving into image analysis when we are not
familiar with the discipline’s basics. The experts are not necessarily oracles of truth, either. My
work argues just the opposite quite often, but non-specialists can get into trouble when diving
into areas where specialists try exercising due caution.

I think that the unique and strange lunar environment, the (at the time) unique event of visiting
an extraterrestrial body, the non-specialists who have tried making technical image analyses,
as well as lack of caution on their part, have contributed to most of the “faked image”
controversy. Factor in some people who may be consciously dishonest (for money or other
gain), ego factors, potential provocateurs, a lay audience that is viewing it and people hating to
admit they are wrong, and we have the situation today.

The Lunar Rover’s movements on the moon. For Apollo 11, the astronauts did not venture
far from the LM. For Apollo 12, they ventured further and visited Surveyor 3 (they landed near
it, apparently almost too near). For Apollo 14 they had lengthy excursions, and they drug
along a cart that held their exploratory and experimental gear, while huffing and puffing (which
ran against expectation, in one-sixth gravity). For the last three Apollo missions, the Lunar
Rover made its appearance. The Lunar Rovers were the most expensive dune buggies ever
made, costing about $40 million each. They had an earth weight of 460 pounds, and could
carry a load of 1080 earth pounds. On the moon, the empty Rover and equipment on it
weighed about 120 pounds. The deployment of the Rover from the LM was a more difficult
task for the astronauts on the moon than it had been in practice sessions on earth.[76] Why
was that, when it weighed one-sixth of its earth weight?

In 1966, Lawrence Maisak published Survival on the Moon. One of the book’s concerns was
with designing vehicles for lunar travel. The one-sixth gravity of the moon presented serious
design issues. A ground-based vehicle on the moon would not closely resemble one that
worked on earth. Maisak calculated that a Rover-type vehicle would need a tread width of
twenty feet (with a center of gravity of six feet high and clearance of three) to keep from tipping
over as it negotiated rough terrain.[77] The Lunar Rovers had a tread width of six feet. Not
only that, they were top heavy because of the astronauts sitting in them with the heavy
backpacks they wore, their center of gravity being at least three feet above the ground. Not
only were the Rover dimensions dissimilar from what was predicted, but also it looked almost
exactly like an earth-based dune buggy. One plausible explanation was that if it traveled
slowly, it could get away with having an unstable design. The Rover was rated to go about ten
miles per hour at top speed. The Apollo 16 astronauts put the Rover through a “Grand Prix”
test where they drove rapidly and whipped it around, bouncing and skidding. The Rover’s
wheels left the ground, and it “fishtailed” near the end of the demonstration. That might have
been the most foolish activity that the astronauts performed on the moon. If the Rover had
tipped over, it could have come down on the Young, possibly puncturing his suit, if not worse.
That would have been a disastrous end to the Apollo program, an astronaut dying to get some
redneck thrills. The official movie even played banjo music during the Grand Prix. According
to William Brian’s analysis, it would have taken little for the Rover to flip over, and the
performance during the Grand Prix demonstration seemed to defy a one-sixth gravity
situation.[78] Even if such a performance was possible, having it bounce into the air during the
stunt was running dangerously.

Various conspiracy theorists have used the Rover’s activities on the moon as evidence of a
cover-up or fabrication. There has been considerable speculation regarding the dust the Rover
kicked up. The way the moon dust behaved is one of the best pieces of evidence that it is
genuine lunar activity. The dust never hangs in the “air” for an appreciable length of time, and
many times the astronauts kicked up dust that flew a long way. When watching astronauts
walking, dust often sprays out from a footfall. When the astronauts fell, sometimes the dust
was kicked a great distance. Unless they made some kind of special moon dust in the
fabrication factory, that is impressive evidence of a vacuum. Nobody is theorizing that they
built a huge vacuum stage on earth.

If they could play boulder-soccer on the moon, do jump-salutes, play golf, throw around
equipment, roll and tumble around and play racecar, why did they never record any athletic
feat that would have hinted that they were in one-sixth gravity? Much looks like it is not
happening in earth gravity, but it could be similar to a magic trick: there is no way of knowing
how they did it unless they let you in on the secret. The behavior of the moon dust, however,
makes the conspiracy theories harder to support. Until I hit pay dirt in July 2001, this area of
evidence, where no feat was obviously done in low gravity conditions, was one of my primary
areas of residual skepticism.

The Apollo 11 footage from Bart Sibrel’s video - a detailed analysis. The Fox TV show on
the possibly hoaxed moon landings interviewed a TV producer named Bart Sibrel. Sibrel said
that he came upon some obscure footage while researching the Apollo 11 mission, which
proves that Apollo 11 never went to the moon. He released a video (A Funny Thing Happened
on the Way to the Moon) that presents some of the footage.
As I played Sibrel’s footage repeatedly, something about it made me suspect that while it was
potentially embarrassing for NASA, it was not evidence that we never went to the moon, but
evidence of NASA playing Hollywood with the mission, trying to give the folks back home a
good show. For a couple of days, I thought that I discovered evidence that the photographic
record of Apollo 11 was at least partly fabricated, and tried presenting my evidence to the
experts, but was snubbed or ignored, and I figured out on my own that I was probably wrong.

I spent long hours analyzing the earth’s phase, the visible portions of earth’s land, the timeline
of the Apollo 11 mission, the time stamps on Sibrel’s footage, the NASA images and other
data. Basically, it mostly added up, except for some possible issues such as the orientation of
Apollo 11 to earth’s equator during the mission, and what appears to be incorrect time stamps
on Sibrel’s footage, and if the cloud pattern over the Eastern Pacific Ocean can be nearly static
for two days. It probably can.

One dynamic that makes analysis difficult and can lead to suspicion are all the “errors” that
NASA makes in presenting its data. In the official film of Apollo 11, there is a scene where
earth is seen from space, and the concurrent conversation has NASA asking how far from
earth Apollo 11 is. The astronauts reply that it is 50,000 miles. The view is of Africa. That is
wrong. At 50,000 nautical miles from earth, Apollo 11 would have been able to see California,
about 12 hours into the mission.[79] On NASA’s web site, they have a caption on that frame
which states that Apollo 11 was 10,000 miles from earth when the picture was taken. With
those kinds of discrepancies in NASA’s presentation of the data, it is easy to see how
conspiracy researchers can develop suspicions, and show how unreliable NASA’s information
can be. Richard Hoagland has discussed at length the “Hollywood” aspect of NASA, with its
public relations arm altering photographs and performing other manipulations. Never-
A-Straight-Answer NASA can give the conspiracy theorists fuel for their fire, and such
incompetence (or playing fast and loose with the data) does not help matters. However, when
I got my hands on the primary data, or closer to it, the anomalies would often get chalked up to
bad editing, sketchy data leading to invalid suspicions, etc.

Some time stamps on the raw footage that Sibrel discovered appear to be incorrect. For
instance, one piece of footage was stamped about 36 hours into the mission, but the footage is
of the Command Module’s computer, which was displaying a time about 30 hours into the
mission. Importantly, the footage where Neil Armstrong says Apollo 11 is 130,000 miles from
earth has a time stamp on it, and it agrees with the time when Apollo 11 should have been
130,000 nautical miles from earth, about 34 hours into the mission.

There was an antenna on the ground in California, called Goldstone, which was specifically
designed to collect the TV signal from space. The TV shows from Apollo 11 were transmitted
when that antenna was facing Apollo 11. For three days in a row, on the way to the moon, the
astronauts beamed down footage to the Goldstone antenna. That is some of the “raw” TV
footage that Sibrel received from NASA by mistake.

They also took still images with their cameras. I found these three images. The middle is from
the “raw” footage that Sibrel discovered, and the others are from the still frames of the Apollo
11 Mission. There are better resolution images of what I will present here, and anybody who
wants to pursue this line of evidence should get the best versions of these images that they
can (“GET” means ground elapsed time, or the time since liftoff).
 Click on image to enlarge

The images are each taken about one day apart, according to the times I have been able to
assign them. In the first image, that is supposedly California peeking out from the clouds. For
weeks, I thought that had to be Vancouver Island, because it appears to be a peninsula, but it
looked too far south and too large to be Vancouver Island. The latitude of California looks
correct, but the land mass does not. It appears as if the “sea” east of the “peninsula” may be
the San Joaquin Valley, and I do not know why there appears to be a “sea” to the north of the
peninsula. The same appearance is in NASA frame AS11-36-5367. It does not appear to be a
valley, but water. I pulled down some satellite images, however, and that illusion was
reproduced.

For those three days, the same cross-shaped hole in the clouds hovers over California. For
the second and third days, there are entire regions of the clouds that appear to be nearly
identical. I doubted it was possible for those clouds to remain unchanged for days. It could be
one of the famous high-pressure systems that form over California, and the clouds end up
getting shifted where the air pressure sends them. A cloud pattern can remain the same while
the actual clouds keep moving. That is most likely what happened, even though the astronauts
talked about the Alaska storm that is seen northwest of the cross over California. Also, in the
southern hemisphere we have similar cloud patterns that are nearly identical. For the entire
eastern Pacific, there are nearly identical cloud patterns for three days. That is where I thought
I found something worth reporting. When I looked at some of Bart Sibrel’s “raw” footage, I
came to feel that I was wrong with my initial impression. I also informed Bart of that.

Bart Sibrel’s theory is that the shots of earth are a cutout, and the earth is being shot from low
earth orbit. I doubt that is true. It does appear, however, that the astronauts had trouble
filming the earth through the Command Module hatch window. There are quite a few images,
both in comparing the still footage with the TV footage, and still images[80], that appear to be
where terminator (the line that divides day from night) games are being played. Terminator
games I would call a minor deception, but there may also be a more innocent explanation. I
was not looking at the best quality images, and I may have been seeing something that was
not there. For a few days I thought it was evidence of fabricating earth phases, to make the
day the image was taken appear to be different. Those cloud patterns seemed odd to me at
first. I then began watching the satellite images for the ocean off America’s West Coast, and it
appears that it is possible for them to look close each day. For the entire hemisphere to look
nearly the same I thought was nearly impossible. After getting some of Sibrel’s footage (some
of it was given an improper time, it appears), some of the patterns are not as identical as it
appeared, and now I believe the three-day pattern is genuine. The Sibrel footage was a
month-long detour, but was a valuable experience.

Again, as with William Brian’s neutral point discrepancy and James Collier’s discovery of
identical Apollo footage on two separate days, there is a more innocent explanation for the
Sibrel footage than it would appear at first glance. There is some controversy over the meeting
of Sibrel and Aldrin. I believed that when Bart showed the “raw” footage to Buzz Aldrin, Aldrin
became interested in how Bart obtained the footage and asked him probing questions.
According to what I understood, Aldrin then said, “If you show this publicly, you are open for a
lawsuit, OK?” You can hear Buzz saying that on a video clip on Sibrel’s web site. When Aldrin
was asked to explain the footage, according to Sibrel, Aldrin replied, "Well you're talking to the
wrong guy! Why don't you talk to the administrator at NASA? We're passengers!" The
debunkers have stated that Aldrin’s response to Sibrel, (they said he “slammed” the door on
Sibrel) was because he did not deal with Sibrel’s kind. Another version I heard was that Bart
“ambushed” Aldrin at his home, and Aldrin then made his threat, but not about the Apollo 11
footage. In September 2002, Sibrel ambushed Aldrin at his hotel and harassed him, and
72-year-old Aldrin punched Sibrel. Somebody related to Apollo, that Sibrel has used for
credibly, recently told me that he thought Sibrel was a “flake,” as well as Kaysing.

Bart had some horrible things happen to him as he tried taking his footage public. The
evidence he discovered may not be proof of faking the Apollo landings, but they may have
thought that he might have had it. When somebody gets the treatment that Bart did, it can turn
one more than a little fanatical, which is an aspect of the psychology that the debunkers never
touch. What happened to Bart happens to Americans every day. Even if his footage does not
prove that there was faking of Apollo 11’s photographic record, he was courageous in coming
forward as he has. Also, because of what he went through, it is unlikely that he will ever
believe that he does not have evidence that proves we faked the moon landings.

My skepticism had been about where Brian O'Leary's had been: the moon landings
themselves. It does not appear that the astronauts shot that Sibrel-discovered film in low earth
orbit. Ralph René's radiation analysis is flawed. While radiation was a danger, and NASA was
playing the odds, I doubt it prevented humans from going into space beyond low earth orbit. It
is possible that the moon landings themselves were staged, but the more I looked into the
evidence, the less I thought that was the case, and my hitting “pay dirt” removed all my doubt
that those men were not walking around on the moon.

Other Anomalies. There are many other anomalies regarding the moon landings that the
conspiracy researchers address. The NASA defenders have easily explained most of them.

I hit pay dirt. After I finished a draft of this essay in the spring of 2001, I emailed a link to it to
some JFK assassination researchers, to get their feedback. The next thing I knew, somebody
kicked it into a JFK assassination forum and then an Apollo Hoax forum became aware of my
work and invited me to submit it to them. That led to some rewarding exchanges. Regarding
the lack of athletic feats performed on the moon, I lamented that although Neil Armstrong said
that he leapt up to the third stair of the LM when leaving the lunar surface, the best visual
record we had was Young’s mundane jump-salute.[81] Jay Windley replied that it might have
been possible to see Armstrong’s leap in the film. I got the footage, looked at it, and Jay was
right. I still find it amazing the footage of Armstrong’s leap was never mentioned in all the long
years of debates. I must have seen it live in 1969, as did many millions of other people, but it
was a forgotten feat. This evidence sealed it for me. Neil Armstrong performed that leap on
the moon.

Most of what I have presented is in the form of negative evidence. The conspiracy theorists
present evidence that says photographs were faked, or the LM rocket had no visible exhaust
plume, or that the moon dust sure acted strangely, or they ask “what were those Nazis and
military contractors really up to?” or “why are there no stars?” or “how did they safely get past
the Van Allen Belt?” The debunkers counter with their evidence, answering those questions
with mundane explanations, but what did we see that really told us that we landed men on the
moon? Unmanned probes could have brought back the moon rocks; if the laser reflectors
were even necessary to bounce back one photon out of one sextillion, probes could have also
set them out. Although the debunkers give plausible answers to the questions about why the
images were not faked, what about them would give anybody proof that they were taken on the
moon? Why were they not taken on a billion-dollar set in Area 51, with state-of-the-art (and
secret) methods that would have made Kubrick’s 2001 seem like a Godzilla movie with
cardboard cities? Why not?

Then the Clementine lunar probe sends back images that show moon dust being disturbed at
the Apollo 15 landing site. Clementine was a military mission. So, the same gang that many
suspect of faking the moon landings sends us military probe images that “prove” that Apollo 15
really landed on the moon. It would be far easier to fake what is interpreted as disturbed dust
in those Clementine images than it would be to fake the moon landings.

Again, we are brought back to, “where is the proof that we really landed on the moon?” Could
even Mission Control have been pumped with fake data from the satellite that admittedly was
pumping faked data before Apollo 11, hoodwinking them too? At some point, the overarching
conspiracy theory begins showing its strain, and people begin brandishing Occam’s razor and
say that the simplest explanation is the right one, “We went to the moon, period.”

When Young leaped 18 inches off the moon, or the astronauts loped across the lunar surface,
they did nothing that could not be easily done on earth, with perhaps some film-speed tricks
being played. Until I hit my pay dirt, the best evidence I saw of astronaut activities happening
on the moon was the way that dust flew and other flying objects behaved, as though they were
in a vacuum. If that stuff was faked, my mind went numb trying to figure out how they could
have done it. The feather-dropping demonstration was something that could also have easily
been faked. Here is the closest thing to “proof” that I have seen.

Click on image to enlarge

Why is it proof to me? For one thing, this is obscure footage, and Armstrong’s leap is not
easily noticed unless one knows what to look for. Nobody from NASA or the hoax debunker
gang has ever used that footage as evidence, as far as I know. The debate has always been
involved with Young’s jump, the loping astronauts, etc. It is so obscure that I have a difficult
time imagining it being staged with wires or some other ruse.

Even though the video quality is poor (here is a clip of it from NASA), the event is
unmistakable, and it confirms what Armstrong talked about in Apollo 11’s technical debriefing.
Armstrong was the first to step onto and the last to leave the lunar surface during the Apollo 11
mission. In the frames presented above, Armstrong put his hands along the rail of the LM’s
ladder to guide him, bent his knees, and leapt up the ladder. The step he landed on appears to
be about chest height, or four feet above the lunar surface. One reason this excited me is that
I was a jumping specialist in my youth. From about age 12, I became a jumping bean. I was a
high jumper and javelin thrower in college, and was a student of technique. I could achieve
about a standing 27-inch vertical jump in my best days. Today’s NBA stars, especially the
great leapers, have around a 36-inch standing vertical leap. David Thompson, the legendary
American Basketball Association star, had a 42-inch vertical leap. The man who holds the
world record for the greatest height cleared above his head, Franklin Jacobs, who cleared a
bar nearly two feet taller than he stood, had a standing vertical leap of 44 inches, which is the
greatest I have heard of. Nobody has ever leapt four feet high in a standing vertical jump on
earth, but Armstrong did as he leapt onto the LM. Not bad for a white guy in a space suit.
They either played wire games, dressed up a monkey as Armstrong and the spacesuit was
only made of cloth, and we are seeing a special effect that they totally wasted because nobody
noticed, or he performed his leap in low gravity. I vote for the last option, and it is the “proof” I
sought for a long time.

The only rebuttal I have received for this evidence has been that it was staged with wires.
There are several pieces of Apollo footage where the hoaxers say it is evidence of wires. I
have closely scrutinized all of that footage, and none of them are convincing evidence of wires
being used. They are all apparently lens flares (reflecting off the astronauts’ antennas, for
instance) or what are obviously “strange” movements that are easily explained as the effect of
one-sixth-earth gravity, which the moon hoax theorists seem to keep forgetting.

This evidence puts to rest William Brian’s theory of high lunar gravity. It also collapses the
debunker and NASA defender explanations about how heavy and restrictive the spacesuits
were, which precluded any spectacular feats. The astronauts in later missions could have
done even better, but nobody tried, partly because the backpacks shifted their center of gravity,
and Armstrong had to touch a rail for guidance and leap forward (even adding to his feat of
four feet of vertical distance, as he also moved a few feet forward). Armstrong said it was
hazardous to jump straight up because of the unbalancing effects of his backpack. It is
understandable why nobody on later missions bounded like stags through the lunar vacuum.

As Americans, we are brainwashed every day with all manner of lies. Regarding the moon
landings, at least, I feel that I know the truth. This “proof” has been far more fun to discover.
For me, the notion that we may have faked the moon landings has been laid to rest. It still was
an effort dominated by the military establishment, and the current push by the U.S. to militarize
space should make every human being shudder in terror. Every tyrant says that he acts in
self-defense. We are playing with our self-annihilation in more ways than one.

In August 2001, I spent time with Brian O’Leary, trying to get the California governor interested
in alternative energy, being that his job was in jeopardy with the blackouts that California
experienced in the winter of 2000-2001. Now, it turns out that Enron and friends raped
California, as hordes of “free market” bandits raided the coffers. The response from the
bureaucracy was predictable, similar to what Dennis has encountered over the years. I had
little high hope that the light bulb would go in the governor’s head (we never got past his front
office, and the governor’s energy advisers canceled a planned meeting with us at the last
minute), but I went to hang out with Brian. Brian told me that the Fox program misrepresented
his interview, excerpting ten seconds from a two-hour interview where they “ambushed” him
with a camera crew. Brian had some residual skepticism about the moon landings themselves,
but it was a small one. Seeing Armstrong’s leap removed Brian’s residual skepticism, and he
is now certain that the Apollo astronauts in fact landed on the moon. He is not happy with how
Fox presented his views, and it jeopardized his relationship with his astronaut pals, Mitchell
and Aldrin among them.
 Possibilities Regarding the Apollo
Anomalies
I would like to help raise the bar for the moon hoax theorists to make a compelling case. First
of all, they can explain Armstrong’s leap.

I have seen no evidence put forth by the conspiracy theorists that has stood up to scrutiny, as
far as it helping to prove that we never landed on the moon, although there are quite a few
points on where I will agree with the conspiracy theorists, such as:

1. With our national security state and its penchant for secrecy and record of fabrication and
cover-up, nobody in the public can say for certain what really happened during the Apollo
program. There were definitely national security games being played at NASA during the
Apollo program. If these kinds of conspiracy musings are to be avoided in the future, the
national security state needs to be dismantled. Dismantling the national security state,
however, is far more important for the survival of the human species than it is to avoid the
propagation of conspiracy theories.

2. Apollo whistle-blowers have probably been murdered or silenced. Thomas Baron’s death
is suspicious (and the disappearance of his 500-page report). There is reason for
suspicion regarding the Apollo 1 fire, concern regarding Jim Irwin’s sudden death, and
less violent suppression efforts directed toward people such as Bart Sibrel (him being
silenced until his evidence was analyzed). The defense establishment has silenced or
murdered many whistle-blowers when it related to military matters, and the same defense
establishment players built the equipment that went to the moon. However, when I have
encountered dead and silenced whistle-blowers, it was usually for the understandable
defense contractor motivation of money. Defense contractors do not want whistle-
blowers airing the fact that they made substandard equipment or were wasteful. The
contractors could get disciplined, lose contracts and get a public black eye. Killing “big
mouths” has been typical behavior in the defense establishment, and I am particularly
aware of that kind of activity happening back during the Apollo days, while the very same
defense establishment was committing genocide in Southeast Asia. They could have
silenced whistle-blowers but also taken their criticisms seriously and attempted to make
their equipment better. Before Baron died, Major General Samuel Phillips was making
observations similar to Baron’s, and issued his own report. Murdering a low level
technician would have been a much easier task than bumping off a major general.

3. NASA played fast and loose in the editing room with its official movies, and their web
sites cannot be relied on to always give the correct information. There are
inconsistencies in the images, such as disappearing and off-center reticles, visor
reflections and other anomalies that can appear suspicious, although none appear to be
the smoking gun of faked footage.

4. There were definitely screw-ups that can lead to suspicion, such as the inconsistencies in
calculating the neutral point in academia, but they have been more innocent errors than
proof of a cover-up.

5. There were many substantial risks regarding the Apollo missions. They were awesomely
dangerous undertakings. Moon hoax debunkers have agreed with me regarding NASA
 continually minimizing the problems overcome and the dangers faced. There was plenty
of held breath at NASA during the moon shots. Little about them was really “routine.”

6. The relatively hitchless nature of the Apollo missions, and the seemingly scripted nature
of the Apollo 13 drama, can give one pause. It is awe-inspiring to ponder all the things
that had to go right for the moon landings to be successful, and when even Robert
Seamans says that it is hard to believe that we went, for the moon hoax theorists to have
doubts is understandable.

7. The fact of no visible exhaust coming from the LMs during lift off appears strange, and
the moon hoax debunkers have had to invoke several phenomena to explain the
situation. However, I heavily lean toward thinking they are right.

8. The poor video quality of Apollo 11 on the moon and the way the TV networks were
forced to record it, lends itself to suspicion.

9. Hiring Nazis to help make the space program a reality (as well as staffing the CIA with
Nazis) was one of history’s more disgusting instances of realpolitik, and the very Nazis
America hired demonstrated their ruthlessness and penchant for deceit numerous times
during their Third Reich days. Nazi fabrications at the CIA greatly contributed to the Cold
War tensions, and it is legitimate to wonder if von Braun and pals pulled some of their
Nazi tricks out of their bag for NASA.

10. With our government’s penchant for secrecy it is difficult to know just what really
happened, but John Glenn’s recent strange appearance on television, Gordon Cooper
and Ed Mitchell’s support for Steven Greer’s Disclosure Project, Brian O’Leary’s
skepticism, Aldrin’s seemingly strange reaction to the footage that Bart Sibrel showed
him, David Adair’s incredible testimony and so on, leads to legitimate suspicion regarding
things not being as NASA would have them appear. Factor in strange events such as
NASA giving the rights to Mars images to a private contractor, the Brookings Institute’s
recommendation to hide signs of intelligent extraterrestrial life from the public, and there
is plenty to be suspicious of.

However, although the above points can be compelling, they do not add up to NASA faking the
moon landings. They may have tried faking it if they felt they had to, but there are too many
strong pieces of evidence that argue for legitimate landings, such as how the moon dust
behaved, aerodynamically clumsy objects flying horizontally for quite a ways and other things
flying as if they were in a vacuum, and now there is Armstrong’s leap to deal with. It has been
tiring to watch the conspiracy theorists sift through the same worthless mine tailings over and
over. Very little of the photographic analysis, such as shadows not running parallel, astronauts
lit up in while standing in shadows, supposed differences between video and still footage,
moving mountains and the like have stood up to the slightest scrutiny, and an area of evidence
is easily and thoroughly explained, and then a new researcher presents the same evidence.
That kind of behavior gives many of the moon hoax debunkers, with more than a little
justification, the feeling that all moon hoax theorists are brainless, dishonest, or gullible.
Regarding how both sides have behaved, I have this question: is the goal discovering the truth,
or attacking or defending the establishment?

If we really landed men on the moon and returned them to earth using 1969 rocket technology,
it was probably the technical achievement of all time. It was also extremely risky and
foolhardy, with numerous dangerous activities never tested in a real environment until men
performed them in space and on the moon. Why? To win a war that we started?

It is not crazy to doubt that men landed on the moon, and it is hard to believe that NASA made
it there and back with people. For instance, in an article posted to the Internet, written by
Elizabeth Thomson, she describes a talk where Neil Armstrong and Robert C. Seamans
addressed an audience at MIT. Buzz Aldrin was also in attendance. Seamans was deeply
involved with the Apollo program. Seamans and Armstrong talked at length about the various
technical problems that were overcome to land on the moon, especially regarding the Lunar
Lander. Seamans put the Apollo feats in perspective when he told the audience, “Sometimes I
have to admit that when I see the Moon coming over the horizon I find it hard to believe that it
really happened." If one of the key technical members of the Apollo effort has a hard time
believing it happened, how “unreasonable” is it for the conspiracy theorists to wonder the same
thing?

If NASA faked landing on the moon, the explanation that seems to hold the most water is that
we had to make it seem as if we landed on the moon in order to beat the Russians, gain
national prestige (at least in our eyes), and make it by when Kennedy said we would. It could
have become a bureaucratic imperative, and they may have tapped the experiences and
talents of Werner von Braun, Stanley Kubrick and others to pull it off. Also, if it was faked,
relatively few people had to be “in on it.” Before the Apollo missions, there was a satellite put
into orbit to beam admittedly fake data to NASA, to test its systems. It could have been the
conduit to pump fake data to Mission Control. With the compartmentalization and other
dynamics that are common to large governmental operations, people could have created a
moon set without knowing it was to be used for faking it, but for “realistic” training exercises.
No conspiracy theorist argues that if the moon landings were faked, many people were in on
it. Few of the hundreds of thousands of people working on the Manhattan Project knew they
were making nuclear bombs, and the true motivation for dropping nuclear bombs on Japan has
only come to light relatively recently, thanks to declassified documents. Of course, in light of
Armstrong’s leap, the likelihood of that scenario approximating reality is on the order of a small
fraction of one percent, in my opinion.

Although I think we landed on the moon with human beings, I have little doubt that the powers
that be were not above trying to fake it if they had to. In significant ways, the space race was a
grotesque display of nationalism, where we made a big deal of planting the flag each time (it
looks like Columbus in 1492) with the Stars and Stripes all over the Apollo equipment (did
somebody think they might be Chinese astronauts?). In addition, I doubt we are being told the
whole truth about the Apollo program and its findings.

The Nature of the Moon Landings Debate

On both sides of the issue, the conversation is extremely polarized. On the conspiracy side,
most of the moon hoax theorists have not dealt with evidence in an evenhanded manner.
Stridency, name-calling, glibness and other deficiencies can readily be seen. Also, there is a
bit of paranoia fueling their fire, although some have good reason for being paranoid. Some
may be consciously dishonest, and there are also “provocateur” suspicions. Richard Hoagland
has called David Percy a possible British intelligence agent. It might seem far-fetched, but with
the Machiavellian workings of our system, it is possible that some moon hoax theorists are
trying to keep the controversy alive as a red herring, distracting the public from considering the
really important things that NASA is covering up.

On the debunker side there is also stridency, name-calling, condescension and far too much of
the style that characterizes the “skeptical” societies. They are generally better than the
conspiracy theorists at sticking to the facts and dealing with them, and have a far better
command of the science than most conspiracy theorists. Some have even put forth
gentlemanly efforts at doing their debunking. They have, almost to a person, failed to seriously
consider or comprehend why so many people think the moon landings may have been faked.
Virtually without exception, they chalk it up to paranoid lunacy, idiocy, greed or dishonesty.
Although those may all be aspects of various conspiracy theorists’ motivations, Americans are
lied to by the power structure everyday, from all directions, and at some level many people
realize it. What most debunkers have in common is being part of the scientific establishment,
which in America usually means being part of the military-industrial complex, and few in that
arena have avoided absorbing the ideological indoctrination that belonging to that
establishment entails.

The Big Cover-up

Whether the moon landings were faked or not is a minor issue compared to what else may
have been covered up: humanity is not alone in the universe.

Hand-in-hand with the military connection are “national security” and secrecy, with plenty of
deception, which are wonderful tools for the self-servers who are running the world. Recently
(March 2001) there was a strange event on television. My wife was watching one of her
favorite shows, Fraser, and John Glenn appeared and said,

“Back in those glory days, I was very uncomfortable when they asked us to say things we
didn't want to say and deny other things. Some people asked, you know, were you alone out
there? We never gave the real answer, and yet we see things out there, strange things, but we
know what we saw out there. And we couldn't really say anything. The bosses were really
afraid of this, they were afraid of the War of the Worlds type stuff, and about panic in the
streets. So we had to keep quiet. And now we only see these things in our nightmares or
maybe in the movies, and some of them are pretty close to being the truth."

It was bizarre, coming out of nowhere, not fitting into the show’s context. It was “funny,” not
funny. It appears that Glenn may have snuck in a disclosure in a forum where it could be
passed off as entertainment. In his twilight years, that performance on Fraser could be
considered a cousin to a deathbed confession. That event also perfectly fits a favored model
of how the powers that be will begin disclosure, by first putting it in benign places such as TV
programs and tabloids, under the rubric of entertainment. The veil of secrecy and “national
security" virtually never protects national security.

What John Glenn was talking about is far more interesting than if humans have landed on the
moon or not. I know many people who have seen UFOs. Some have been taken aboard
them, and I went and saw one for myself in 2005. They are very real. It is estimated that tens
of millions of Americans have seen UFOs. I have spent many years looking at UFO evidence.
There is a great deal of “unexplained” phenomena. It is even admitted today that the Air
Force’s Project Blue Book was more of a disinformation effort than an investigation (Allen
Hynek, who worked for Project Blue Book, admitted it), designed to discourage public interest
in UFOs, rather than resolve the issue. In the Project Blue Book Special Report, it was
admitted that more than 20% of the incidents remained unexplained by prosaic explanations,
even when the game was rigged.

The government disinformation effort is apt at confusing issues it does not want resolved. For
an instance of relatively recent government disinformation, those two old geezers who claimed
in the early 1990s to make all the crop circles were probably part of a British Intelligence
operation. Immediately after an English tabloid broke the story, the mainstream media
immediately and uncritically put it on the front page around the world. Try imagining any other
story that a publication such as the Weekly World News would break, that would be
immediately broadcast on the evening news with Dan Rather, with zero investigation by the TV
networks. It perfectly fits Herman and Chomsky’s propaganda model of the media. Soon after
those geezers made their “confession,” I heard a European UFO investigator talk about that
event. When they tried tracing the story to its source, the trail passed through a tabloid, which
broke the story, and led to a front organization for British Intelligence. It is the standard story. I
will not deal with all the UFO evidence that I have seen over the years. There are plenty of
resources out there for those who want to do the research.

The establishment UFO debunkers, the “skeptics” Philip Klass and James Oberg in particular,
have not done their movement many favors with their behavior. UFO investigator Don Ecker
once interviewed Klass on a radio show. When Klass gave one of his standard answers on an
aspect of the UFO controversy, Ecker (one of the most personable UFO investigators out
there) politely challenged him, and Klass yelled a stream of curses, which Ecker had to keep
beeping off the air, as he asked Klass to please stop cussing. Klass then hung up on Ecker
and the listening audience. Oberg has more class, but he is irascible. I have rarely seen him
do any debunking work where he does not unleash an insult or invective at those who he is
dealing with, and he can be gloriously wrong in his analyses.[82] It is no accident that Klass
and Oberg are both august members of the “skeptical” Committee for the Scientific
Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP). For those challenging the establishment
on such issues, the road is rough.

There is plenty to be disturbed about regarding NASA. Most Americans do not know it, but
NASA has privatized the images coming back from Mars, giving the rights to Michael Malin’s
company. NASA has been less than forthright regarding the Face on Mars issue. Malin and
the Face on Mars crowd played cat and mouse over the data for years. Recently a full image
of the face was released, and NASA says that it is a natural formation because it is
asymmetrical. I still wonder. There are strikingly geometric aspects of the face and head. It
could be ancient and eroded. Whatever the case may be, privatizing the Mars images not only
is contrary to NASA’s charter, but also ridiculous. Imagine if NASA gave the rights to the moon
rocks to the contractor who built the LM. Giving Malin rights to the Mars images, because his
company provided the camera, amounts to the same thing. It is outrageous, but passes in
silence. If the NASA defenders want more credibility with those who are skeptical of NASA,
taking on that issue might give them some, instead of the standard apologetics. Oberg
recently wrote an Op Ed in USA Today (April 24, 2001) where he complained about NASA’s
increasing penchant for secrecy. If even Oberg is making that observation, it is difficult to deny.

An impressive strategy to try resolving the extraterrestrial issue has been the Disclosure
Project, run by Steven Greer. How can anybody argue with waiving the national securities
laws so people can tell what they know? What kind of “nuts” does Greer have lined up to
testify? One of them is Mercury astronaut Gordon Cooper. Greer’s co-chair for the secret
Congressional hearings was Apollo 14’s Ed Mitchell. There are also high-ranking members of
government who want to testify. So far, the American government has stonewalled the effort,
and Greer is being forced into doing it outside the official channels, if he lives long enough.
The situation speaks volumes about our system’s legitimacy. Greer’s book Extraterrestrial
Contact confirms most of what I am aware of regarding UFOs. It is well worth reading.

Edwards Air Force Base in California is prominent in UFO lore. A famous meeting supposedly
happened there in 1954. Several alien craft landed at Edwards Air Force Base, and had an
“open house,” allowing scientists to crawl over them. President Eisenhower was there, as
allegedly were representatives of the Rockefellers and Rothschilds. Many years ago I read an
account by a scientist who supposedly attended that meeting. He wrote that the scientists
examining the craft had strange expressions. Here we were, the most powerful nation on earth
and the most technologically advanced. We were full of national pride, thinking we were so
smart and powerful. As they examined the craft, those scientists realized that we were not far
removed from the cave. The scientist who wrote his account was sympathetic toward those
bewildered scientists, as their intellectual edifices crumbled. His account reminded me of the
Brookings Institute’s report to NASA in 1960, where they warned that the scientists might be
the group most threatened by the discovery of extra-terrestrial beings of superior intelligence.
One event that Cooper wants to testify to is when his squadron filmed a landed UFO at
Edwards Air Force Base, which Cooper is certain was not of earthly origin.[83]

For many years I have read accounts of UFO encounters and activity, as well as how our
government dealt with it, and the surrounding milieu. There is far more to the situation than
just the nuts and bolts of UFOs. Greer has been talking to heads of state about the UFO
situation, briefing the CIA director as well as the White House. There apparently is virtually no
hostile intent from the ETs. Most extraterrestrial civilizations with representatives on earth are
of benevolent intent, trying to help us get over the hump. We are playing with destroying
ourselves these days, but they cannot violate the Prime Directive (Star Trek is not that
fictional). A fair number are neutral, and some are of less-than-benevolent intent. As Creation
has apparently been designed, like attracts like, and the power hungry people who run our
country have generally interacted with negatively oriented extraterrestrials. The benevolent
ones have tried interacting with our governments, but all our power structure wants are new
weapons and technologies of domination. The benevolent ETs will have no part of that, so the
people who run our planet (called the Sinister Secret Government by Zoosh, the World
Management Team by others, and yes, they are related to the various secret societies that
have tried running things from behind the scenes for millennia) end up dealing with the “bad”
aliens.

Greer confirms the kind of story that Philip Corso wrote of, and others who have come
forward. Apparently, our high tech revolution has the aliens to thank in some measure. Part of
the technology was given to us, but a lot of it is from reverse engineering captured alien craft.
One of the more startling revelations of Greer's book is that the world’s governments are not
even in charge. The UFO situation began falling out of Eisenhower's grasp when he was
President, which may be partly why he warned about the military-industrial complex becoming
too powerful when he left office. By the time John Kennedy got into office, he not only had no
control over the situation, he could not even find out much about it. Other presidents after
Kennedy have tried finding out more about it, Carter and Clinton for example, but they ran into
the brick wall of supranational security. For the people running the show, United States
presidents are irrelevant, left out of the loop, and do not even know where the loop is. The
group in control of the UFO situation is largely composed of a variety of private corporations,
largely the same defense contractors who built the equipment for NASA to go to the moon.[84]
Isn’t that interesting?

Technology has come a long way since the Apollo days, and the spooks apparently have the
technology to create Star-Trek-like Holodeck experiences, where those subject to it think they
are experiencing actual events, but it is virtual reality. Sound crazy? Try getting into their
secret areas to find out, as Barry Goldwater did. Would they be “above” foisting such
technologies on us?

The famous shuttle STS-48 footage, where a ground-based weapon at the super-secret Pine
Gap base in Australia apparently shot at a nimble UFO, is also a situation that Greer’s sources
confirm.

There is even a Marilyn Monroe connection. Stephen Greer obtained a CIA document that
came from a wiretap on Monroe's telephone. In a document dated two days before her death,
according to the CIA, she talked on the phone about JFK having a private viewing of a crashed
ET spacecraft and dead alien bodies, and she threatened the Kennedys that she would hold a
press conference and “tell all.”[85] Maybe that had something to do with why she and
Kennedy were killed.

Greer was an MD before he became involved in trying to bring the extraterrestrial situation into
public awareness, and was admittedly rather naïve about many things when he began his
quest. One area where I disagree with him is where he cautions the Secret Government
against making public free energy and anti-gravity technology.[86] I have seen virtually no
evidence that the people running the show have any benevolent intent towards the human
race. If there is any benevolent intent, it is related to the benevolent intent that a farmer might
have for his cows. He wants to keep them healthy because after milking them for years he
eventually slaughters and eats them. My free energy adventures have shown me that free
energy is not suppressed because of fears of war, but people protecting their wealth and
power. If the self-selected “illuminated ones” (called “Illuminati” in one of the group’s
incarnations) had benevolent intent at one time, it long ago became corrupted, largely because
of playing with dark path tactics of secrecy and deception, playing at being the elite, and light
workers eventually became dark workers. Humanity is doing a fine job of destroying our planet
by suppressing clean, renewable energy and other earth-friendly technologies. There are
plenty of alternative energy technologies that do not readily become weapons. Humanity has
never tried harnessing the tides, nor aggressively pursued solar energy (because oil
companies are the biggest “solar” companies), or even geothermal energy (just drill down a
ways, anywhere on earth, for steam to run turbines).
Free energy does not have to come from alien technology. Humanity’s energy problems have
little to do with technology, per se, but our degenerate spiritual condition, where greed
becomes a virtue, winning is everything, we have great national pride (greed and pride are two
of the seven deadly sins), and many think if they tell a lie often enough, it makes it true. As a
species, we are locked into our third chakra (power). The fourth (the heart) is waiting to be
awakened. Jesus was a forerunner of where we are headed, if we choose to go there. The
emotionally crippled condition of Western men is one symptom of our malaise. We may not
awaken in time to avoid our self-destruction as a species. It is up to us. The answers are
here, if we care to pursue them

After I finished a draft of this essay, Greer assembled twenty witnesses who talked on May 9,
2001 in Washington D.C. The twenty witnesses were apparently the best Greer could come
up with, for those who were willing to talk without getting national securities laws protection.
They were almost all ex-military personnel. Only one of them said they had actually seen an
alien in the flesh. The others talked about tracking UFOs in planes and similar events. The
witnesses with the juicy testimony apparently will not talk until they get protection. Greer has
done the best he can with what he has, and there is some reason for optimism, but the media
dismissed the testimonies as maybe those witnesses did not see what they thought they saw,
even when most witnesses added to their testimony that they were told not to talk about what
they saw. The “it will waste congress’ time” angle is again being used. Is it worth waiving the
national securities laws so astronauts and generals can testify to what they have
experienced?

Footnotes
[1] See Dennis' description of that offer and his rejection in The Alternative, p. 20.

[2] See Parenti, Dirty Truths, pp. 172-191. America’s radical left made their ideology explicit after the World Trade
Center attacks of September 2001. See Stephen Shalom and Michael Albert’s “Conspiracies or Institutions? - 9-11
and Beyond,” in Z Magazine, July/August 2002, pp. 3-7.

[3] A photograph of Gary, with his partner pointing to where the bullet hit his belt is in Gary Wean’s There’s a Fish in
the Courthouse, facing p. 114.

[4] In Anthony Summers' Conspiracy (p. 144-145) he reported a conversation with Victor Marchetti (the first CIA
employee to go public with criticism of the CIA; Ralph McGehee was the second and perhaps last to do it “legally”),
where he asked Marchetti if he knew anything about the ONI espionage operations against the Soviet Union.
Marchetti was an expert in Soviet affairs, as the CIA had recruited him out of college in 1955, where he had majored
in Soviet studies. Marchetti responded with:

"At the time, in 1959, the United States was having real difficulty in acquiring information out of the Soviet Union; the
technical systems had, of course, not developed to the point that they are at today, and we were resorting to all sorts
of activities. One of these activities was an ONI program which involved three dozen, maybe forty, young men who
were made to appear disenchanted, poor, American youths who had become turned off and wanted to see what
communism was all about. Some of these people lasted only a few weeks. They were sent into the Soviet Union, or
into Eastern Europe, with the specific intention the Soviets would pick them up and 'double' them if they suspected
them of being U.S. agents, or recruit them as KGB agents. They were trained at various naval installations both here
and abroad, but the operation was being run out of Nag's Head, North Carolina."

Marchetti seemed to describe Oswald almost exactly. Significantly, the night Oswald was arrested after JFK's death,
he tried twice to call a man named "Hurt." His calls were intercepted and disconnected by the jail, possibly at the
direction of the Secret Service. Apparently Oswald was trying to call a man in North Carolina, in the Nag's Head
vicinity, and the Hurt in question was probably a military intelligence man.

[5] For background on this situation, I recommend Andrew and Leslie Cockburn’s Dangerous Liaison or Noam
Chomsky’s The Fateful Triangle and his other works.

[6] For more evidence of this tale’s possible veracity, several years ago I read a news item about Marilyn Monroe’s
former home in Los Angeles. The people who bought her house discovered that the crawl space above her
bedroom was filled with a jumble of wiring, which was probably related to surveillance equipment. Whether it was
the CIA’s wiring, the Mafia’s or somebody else’s is a mystery, but somebody knew what was happening in Marilyn’s
bedroom.

[7] See Chomsky’s The Fateful Triangle, especially pp. 13-17.

[8] See his brilliant arguments in his A Little Matter of Genocide.

[9] See Bamford’s Body of Secrets, p. 82, in the chapter titled “Fists.”

[10] See William Blum’s Killing Hope for a summary of those American interventions.

[11] See Bamford’s Body of Secrets, p. 83.

[12] See Bamford’s Body of Secrets, p. 89.

[13] All nationalism is a false consciousness, which fictionally invests the peoples of a political jurisdiction with unique
virtue. It is an appeal to human egotism, in order to manipulate people. Such a tactic has always been used by
ruling classes to manipulate the masses, usually into supporting violence against those not in the same political
jurisdiction, or even those in the same jurisdiction, but not of the same political orientation. The masses always have
to be deceived/enticed/coerced into doing the elites’ dirty work. If there is any trend of history that can be called a
“law,” it may be that one. When people begin taking their power back, and see themselves (and everybody else) as
sovereign, divine beings, that game will end.

[14] Oswald was seen just before and just after the assassination. Carolyn Arnold saw Oswald in the second floor
lunchroom fifteen minutes before the assassination, eating lunch, and saw him on the book depository’s first floor
only five minutes before the assassination. He was seen in the lunchroom two minutes after the assassination, by a
few people. The “sniper’s nest” was on the sixth floor. See the timeline in Fetzer’s Murder in Dealey Plaza, for
instance.

[15] Perhaps the greatest work of fiction in my lifetime is the Magic Bullet’s tale. The official story is that the military-
jacketed round was fired by Oswald’s rifle, entered JFK’s back, exited his throat, entered John Connally’s back,
made several wounds and shattered bones, to somehow lodge in Connally’s clothing, to be found in virtually
undamaged condition on an unused stretcher in Parkland Hospital. Here are two pieces of evidence that collapse
the Magic Bullet theory. In order for the bullet traverse JFK’s back and exit his throat, it would in all likelihood have
passed through the bones of his spine (see David Mantik’s diagram in Fetzer’s Murder in Dealey Plaza, p. 3). If it hit
bone, there was no way for it to have exited JFK’s body without leaving a very messy exit wound (and even if it did
not hit bone, its exit would not have been a “clean” one), and shattering, as the bullet that supposedly hit JFK’s head
(the next bullet fired) did. In the infamous “Stare-of-Death” autopsy photo of JFK (See Harrison Livingstone’s High
Treason 2, the photo section after p. 432), on the lower edge of the wound made by the emergency tracheotomy, the
edge of the bullet wound can clearly be seen, and it is a clean, circular wound, as would be made by an entrance
wound, not an exit wound (the doctors who saw it at Parkland described it as an entrance wound). The shattering,
tumbling bullet that supposedly passed through JFK’s spine could not have made that wound. In addition, the back
wound was probed during the autopsy, and it shortly ended, not passing through his body. That is only a small part
of the evidence that contradicts the Magic Bullet’s amazing story. People with ballistics backgrounds have long told
me how ridiculous the Magic Bullet’s tale is.

[16] See the timeline in Murder in Dealey Plaza, edited by Jim Fetzer. It brings up pieces of evidence that contradict
the official series of events. It is hard to know just what might be the true series of events regarding Oswald’s
movements between the assassination and his capture little more than an hour later.

[17] See Gary Wean’s There’s a Fish in the Courthouse, pp. 581-582.

[18] See Gary Wean’s There’s a Fish in the Courthouse, pp. 567-572.

[19] The list of evidence that has disappeared, been destroyed, or is still classified, is vast. For a sketch of the
pieces of crucial evidence that have disappeared, consider the following: still pictures and film taken by witnesses of
the assassination in Dealey Plaza, bullet fragments found in Dealey Plaza, bullet fragments removed from John
Connally’s body, as well as fragments removed from JFK; Lyndon Johnson ordering JFK’s limousine cleaned out
mere minutes after the assassination, which thereby destroyed a great deal of evidence; the Minox camera, the
negative to 133-A, the fourth backyard photo, JFK’s brain, and one doctor burning his notes from the JFK autopsy.
That is a minimal portion of the list of missing evidence. Then factor in the many strange and/or sudden deaths of
witnesses and others connected to the possible conspiracy, and the holes in the JFK evidence are gaping.

[20] There is a documentary titled Fake: The Forged Photo That Framed Oswald that features Jack White's
investigation of the photos, and has Marrs talking about the Hesters' experience.

[21] Posner. Case Closed. p. 344, n. Then again, Posner may have not solved the mystery. Posner is notorious for
misrepresenting or fabricating the evidence he presented in Case Closed. See, for instance, David Starks’ The
Posner Report: A Study In Propaganda: One Hundred Errors in Gerald Posner's Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald
and the Assassination of JFK . See also Michael Parenti’s History as Mystery, pp. 190-198. That Posner produced
flawed scholarship is fairly easy to discern. More important was how the media establishment uncritically embraced
his work, when the same establishment mercilessly derided Oliver Stone’s JFK movie before it was even released.
The establishment did not embrace Posner’s work because it had any merit, but because it told the story the
establishment wanted told. Posner exonerated the government in his next book about the Martin Luther King Jr.
assassination. Maybe he will write his next work about the Bobby Kennedy assassination, completing a government-
defending assassination trilogy.

[22] See Fetzer’s Murder in Dealy Plaza, pp. 324-360. See the analysis on John McAdams’ site, a page titled
“Bogus Conspiracy Photo Experts” and the sub-link “Was Mary Moorman Standing in Elm Street?” I have to side
with the analysis that McAdams presents. White apparently made a significant error in his reconstruction, and it
defeated his thesis that Mary Moorman was standing in the street when she was taking pictures of the motorcade,
while JFK was being shot.

[23] See Harrison Livingstone’s High Treason 2, p. 464. David Perry wrote “Who Speaks for Roscoe White?” His
essay can be found on the Internet, which questions aspects of the Roscoe White evidence, and his connection to
Oswald and Ruby.

[24] Robert Groden, who had what is widely believed to the best cache of photographic materials on the JFK
assassination, had his home burglarized and his material stolen in 1999. This is a common theme in the JFK milieu,
and the suspicion that people working for the real assassins have been tying up loose ends (or the CIA and FBI
covering their tracks), is not easy to dismiss.

[25] HSCA Report, Testimony of Calvin S. McCamy. Cecil W. Kirk was the other expert witness to testify regarding
the backyard photographs. The HSCA discussion and conclusions are published in Volume VI of their report.

[26] See Anthony Summers’ Conspiracy, p. 212, for instance. Gerald Posner makes a number of mildly plausible
attempts to explain the situation in his Case Closed.

[27] For instance, Carlos Hathcock, the senior instructor at the Marine sniper school at Quantico, led an effort to
reproduce Oswald’s feat at Quantico, reproducing the firing angle, the range, the moving target, the timing, and every
nuance of the official scenario, and made many attempts to reproduce Oswald’s feat. The Marine’s best marksmen
could not reproduce Oswald’s feat. According to Israeli Mossad agent Victor Ostrovsky, Mossad also attempted to
reproduce Oswald’s feat, with the best equipment and people, and deemed Oswald’s feat “impossible.” See, for
instance, Fetzer’s Murder in Dealey Plaza, pp. 42-43.

[28] See, for instance, M. Wesley Swearingen’s FBI Secrets, written from the inside, as was Ralph McGehee’s
Deadly Deceits. See also Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall’s trilogy of Cages of Steel, Agents of Repression and
The COINTELPRO Papers. See also William Blum’s Killing Hope and Rogue State, Noam Chomsky’s Deterring
Democracy and many of his other works.

[29] See, for instance, a summary of “realist” theory in The Perils of Anarchy, edited by Brown, Lynn-Jones and
Miller, pp. ix-xxi. See Howard Zinn’s response to realist theory in his Declarations of Independence, pp. 9-31. I
consider the “radical” position far more explanatory than the realist position.

[30] Wean, There's a Fish in the Courthouse, pp. 189-195.

[31] See Vankin and Whelan, The 50 Greatest Conspiracies of All-Time, pp. 119-127. See Stich, Defrauding
America, pp 435-463.

[32] See Stich, Defrauding America, p. 440. Featherstone and Rothberg, "Suicide or Murder?" Lies of our Times,
November 1991, pp. 5-6. Vankin and Whelan, 50 Greatest Conspiracies of all Time, pp. 119-127.

[33] See Vankin and Whelan, 50 Greatest Conspiracies of all Time, pp. 288-294. Gritz, Called to Serve, pp. 583-587.

[34] Stich, Defrauding America, pp. 580-583.

[35] For instance, see Michael Ruppert’s “The PROMIS Threat,” Nexus, January-February 2001, pp. 27-32, 73-74.

[36] Stich, Defrauding America, pp. 69-78.

[37] McGehee, Deadly Deceits, pp. 1-16.

[38] For a sampling of the witnesses, their experiences and their credentials, see Greer’s Extraterrestrial Contact, pp.
355-359.

[39] See Beckley and Crockett, Prophecies of the Presidents, p. 115. See Good, Above Top Secret, pp. 404-405.
See also Greer, Extraterrestrial Contact, p. 468.

[40] See the transcript of Adair's Art Bell Show appearance in The Sedona Journal of Emergence, February 1998,
pp. 26-39. A transcript may be available from Art Bell's organization.

[41] See Garrison, On the Trail of the Assassins, pp. 160-168. See Fonzi, The Last Investigation, pp. 191-192.

[42] See Bowen, Immaculate Deception, pp. 67-94. See Stich, Defrauding America, pp. 235-262. See Vankin and
Whelan, 50 Greatest Conspiracies of all Time, pp. 165-173.

[43] Gritz, Called to Serve, p. 497.

[44] See Agee and Poelchau, White Paper Whitewash. See also Blum, Killing Hope, pp. 352-369.

[45] See discussion in Harrison, High Treason II, pp. 403-407. Although Wallace was running as a Democrat in
1972, if he had not won the Democratic nomination, he might have run as an independent again. He ran for
president again in 1976.

[46] See discussion in Harrison, High Treason II, pp. 421-433.

[47] Ford proposed the Magic Bullet theory when he served on the Warren Commission, helped out by Arlen Specter,
who has had a highly successful political career after concocting the Magic Bullet theory.

[48] See Ellen Ray’s “Noriega, Torrijos, and the CIA,” Lies of Our Times, February 1990, p. 10. See the letter from
Graham Greene, in Lies of Our Times, March 1990, p. 3. See Blum, Killing Hope, pp. 453, 306.
[49] See Blum, Killing Hope, pp. 305-314.

[50] See Cockburn’s "Through a Glass Darkly," Lies of Our Times, November 1991, pp. 12-13.

[51] See Vidal, United States, Essays, 1952-1992, pp. 857-883.

[52] See Vankin and Whelan, 50 Greatest Conspiracies of all Time, pp. 325-331. The more orthodox interpretation is
Jack Jones’ Let Me Take You Down.

[53] See Vankin and Whelan, 50 Greatest Conspiracies of all Time, pp. 332-337. Gritz, Called to Serve, pp. 548-550.

[54] Gritz, Called to Serve, pp. 492-554.

[55] See Epperson, The Unseen Hand, pp. 151-163.

[56] Zogby International poll, published August 30, 2004.

[57] Moon's sphere of influence = (moon's mass/earth's mass) to the 0.4th power multiplied by the distance from the
earth's to moon's centers. (See Orbital Motion, equation 12.1, p. 371)

Using a mass of 1/81 of earth and 230,000 miles, the calculation is as follows:

0.4
(1/81) x 230,000 miles = 39,658 miles.

[58] See Richard Lewis, Voyages of Apollo, p. 116.

[59] Rockets work by controlled explosions. The entire principle behind conventional rocketry is the violent reaction
of expanding gases. The fuel reacts and burns, the burn being done in controlled fashion, where the gases expand
in one direction: out of the rocket nozzle. An explosion is simply a quick expansion caused by a violently quick
chemical reaction. The reaction causes a great increase in temperature, which makes the gases expand, hence the
gases issuing from the rocket. The quick reaction and explosive expansion of the hot gases is accompanied by light
given off, which is because some of the radiation given off makes it into the visible spectrum of light. The quicker the
reaction, the hotter it is, and the more light produced, such as the difference between “red hot” and “white hot.” Not
all the electromagnetic radiation given off is in the spectrum of visible light, and different substances give off light in
different frequencies. All the same, the hotter a reaction is, the more electromagnetic radiation it will produce.
Burning a piece of wood is a quick release of energy that the sun slowly gave to the tree over many years. The
hypergolic fuels used in the Apollo missions were used for two reasons. One reason is that if the fuel exploded on
contact, no ignition system would be needed, which brings up the second, more important, reason. The fuel on the
Service and Landing Modules had to be lifted into space first. Therefore, the more “efficient” the fuel was (i.e., the
more explosion per pound of propellant), the better it was to take aboard the Service and Landing Modules. It meant
that less fuel would be needed to send it into space. The hypergolic fuels used on the Service and Landing Modules
were the most powerful propellants that NASA had. They created more powerful explosions than the fuels used in
the earlier stages. Thus, they burned at a greater temperature, which would have made the light given off relatively
even greater than the earlier stages, in theory. This footnote was corrected by Jay Windley, who said that the
spectrum of light given off by different fuels would be different for each fuel, and a fuel that burned hotter would not
necessarily look brighter than a colder one, because of the spectral properties of each substance. He is right. Even
though the hotter a reaction is, the more electromagnetic energy given off, it may not be in the visible spectrum, and
the tendency of giving off of electromagnetic radiation will vary from substance to substance. Jay also presented an
image of the exact fuel used in the LM ascent stage, and it did look fainter than other fuels, but not close to invisible.
Jay said that it took him significant time and research to finally explain the lack of visible exhaust plume to his
satisfaction, and it could look anomalous even to rocket scientists, until they had done some homework.

[60] See Bennett and Percy, Dark Moon, pp. 325-330.

[61] National Geographic reported that in its December 1966 issue. See Bennett and Percy, Dark Moon, pp. 503,
529, n. 26.
[62] A close relative of mine was a whistleblower in the Department of Defense. Long ago, during the Apollo era, he
was on a project where a defense contractor was supplying timing equipment for an oceanographic project. They
were similar to atomic clocks, where Mickey Mouse watches would have been adequate. He had seen prodigious
waste in the Defense Department before (such as $500 million studies that nobody would read, stacked in a
warehouse, collecting dust), but that one got him more bothered than usual, and he began making noise. He
eventually got some attention, and the government did not buy those extraordinarily expensive timing mechanisms,
and used the equivalent of Mickey Mouse watches to get the job done. It saved the government about $400 million.
When it came time to award the whistleblower, my relative’s boss stepped up and said that it was his doing. My
relative’s boss received the highest award a civilian can receive, directly from the president; he also received a check
for about the equivalent of two years’ wages, and an annual annuity, and my relative got zero. No recognition, no
money; typical defense establishment behavior. In fact, his superiors scuttled his career. My relative was fairly early
in his career, and was rather naïve. Years later, as a defense contractor tried recruiting him, the issue of that
instance of his whistle-blowing came up, and the contractor told him that he was lucky to be alive. For saving a $400
million contract, the contractor said, quite a few defense contractors would have had him murdered. He was lucky.
As my relative’s career progressed, he began seeing instances of how other whistle-blowers were silenced. In one
case, a federal magistrate disappeared, Jimmy Hoffa-style, as he was about to render an unfavorable ruling
regarding a defense contractor. I am not a deeply connected insider, but I know whistleblowers.

A few years ago, a friend of mine testified in a whistleblower lawsuit. Back in the 1980s, he worked for a defense
contractor in Silicon Valley, where they built some of the equipment that was used in Desert Storm. He was a
computer programmer and analyst, and developed an accounting and inventory system for defective parts. There is
plenty of red tape involved in government cost-plus contracts. The contractor needed to account for their defective
pieces (they would be paid for them). They would build an assembly for the equipment. If during inspection the
assembly was found defective, it was put it in a defective bin. A book-to-physical reconciliation, where the
accounting system will say there should be 100 items on hand, and the items on hand are counted, to see if there
really are 100, assesses an accounting system’s accuracy. That defense contractor had production deadlines and
other pressures, which were typical situations in manufacturing processes, except the customer was the government,
so it really did not have to work all that well (if you have been in the business, you know what I mean). They would
periodically run out of parts, but they had deadlines to meet. So, somebody would sneak back to the defective bins,
take out the defective assemblies, and put them into the equipment. When it would come time to account for the
defective pieces, they would be short. An engineer began making noise. He knew that they were putting out
defective product because of that practice (and others), and overcharging the government.

The reason whistleblower laws exist today is because of what happened to them. That engineer was fired and
blackballed from the industry. He was an early case of why there are whistleblower laws today. My friend no longer
worked for the defense contractor when the situation began making the news, but he followed the events. In Silicon
Valley and other defense industry havens, the marketing practices were a little unusual, but not that unusual, if one
has been in the corporate world much. A local house of prostitution was hired by the defense contractor to service
the many Pentagon officials that came visiting. Probably all the local defense contractors periodically hired that
establishment, with “the best girls in town.” I saw similar things in the trucking industry, and they were minor
leaguers compared to the defense establishment. Just as a stink began brewing over the ruckus the whistleblower
was making, and just as eyes began being focused on a certain house of prostitution, the madam disappeared. My
friend watched what happened, and stayed quiet for several years.

Some sense of justice prevailed in that case. The original whistleblowing engineer received restitution, and waged a
class-action lawsuit on behalf of the taxpayer against the defense contractor, asking for more than a billion dollars in
damages. It became high profile, easily researched. I will not name names here. Naming names is what gets
people in trouble. With enough of a spotlight on the situation, and a defense contractor backed up a few steps, after
a bunch of soul-searching and dealing with genuine fear, my friend contacted the engineer’s legal team. He was
willing to testify about what he saw, how he developed the accounting system and how the defective parts inventory
came up short and why. In normal courtroom situations, surprise witnesses are rarely used, but each side knows
who is going to testify. When my friend’s name was put on the witness list, he no longer lived in California, but lived
about 1000 miles away. Suddenly, a private investigator for the defense contractor began beating the bushes hard in
my friend’s neighborhood. The investigator found my friend’s brother’s ex-wife, in a distant county, trying to dig up
dirt. He contacted my friend and told him what he was doing. It was obviously intended to intimidate my friend. I
have been in kangaroo court before, where public officials tried intimidating me as I testified. I counseled my friend
on what he could expect, and fortunately they did not try to intimidate him on the witness stand. They probably did
not find anything to use against him. The whistleblower won the lawsuit, but such situations are rarely resolved to
the plaintiff’s benefit. The defense contractor usually assigns a team of lawyers to appeal the ruling indefinitely, and
they quite possibly will never part with a dime in damages from the ruling. That is how it works most of the time, if it
even gets to the point of a favorable ruling.

The most depressing aspect of whistleblowing, however, is not that their employers try silencing them and ruining
their lives (it is part of their “job”), but that their friends and colleagues disown them, ostracizing them for speaking
up, because it “rocked the boat.” The crime of the whistleblowers has even been called “committing the truth.” In
whistleblowing circles, that is the most dismaying part of their experience. Some whistleblowers were driven over the
edge not because how their employers treated them, but how their friends and families did.

[63] See Lillian Kozloski’s, U.S. Space Gear: Outfitting the Astronaut, p. 81.

[64] See Brian, Moongate, p. 69.

[65] See Brian, Moongate, p. 78.

[66] See Lillian Kozloski’s, U.S. Space Gear: Outfitting the Astronaut, pp. 91, 96.

[67] See Brian, Moongate, pp. 209-212.

[68] Reading Kozloski’s U.S. Space Gear does not lend evidence to Brian’s suspicion, as the A7L suits weighed in
the range of other suits like it.

[69] See Dennis Piszkiewicz, The Nazi Rocketeers: Dreams of Space and Crimes of War, p. 167.

[70] Probably the best account regarding the post-war hiring of the Nazis, and what it cost America, is in Christopher
Simpson’s Blowback.

[71] See Christopher Simpson’s The Splendid Blond Beast, especially pp. 217-231.

[72] See Frank Winter’s Rockets into Space, for a discussion of those early days of rocketry.

[73] See Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation, pp. 37, 283. Schlosser relied on Tom Bower's The Paperclip Conspiracy
(see pp. 214-232), which chronicled, using declassified documents and interviews, Strughold's activities in covering
up the human experiments performed at Dachau for the Luftwaffe. The Strughold/Haber story is one of hundreds
like them, of Nazi scientists brought into the USA because of their usefulness, and if their research was performed on
involuntary human subjects, the Americans were only too willing to look the other way. There is no doubt that all the
scientists working with Strughold were either aware of the human experiments that formed the basis of their
research, or performed the experiments themselves. The experiments were mainly involved with the effects of high
altitude and cold.

The experiments included throwing people into ice tanks and monitoring their deaths, often with thermometers put
into their orifices, along with heart monitors, etc. The high altitude experiments often were performed by putting
Jewish prisoners from Dachau (hundreds died in those experiments) into a state-of-the-art decompression chamber.
If the prisoners survived, they were then killed and dissected. Operation Paperclip and related programs protected
hundreds of Nazi war criminals from prosecution, and if Haber did not perform the experiments himself, his papers
written with Strughold were based on the findings of those experiments, and everybody working with Strughold knew
full well who the experimental subjects were. Strughold became such an American hero that a library was named
after him in Texas. Jewish groups protested, and Strughold has been dealt with fairly harshly by posterity. Haber
merits similar treatment.

[74] Those quotes can be found in David McGowan’s Derailing Democracy, pp. 194-195.

[75] See, for instance, von Braun, et al, Space Travel: A History, or White’s Rockets into Space.

[76] See Richard Lewis, Voyages of Apollo, p. 212.

[77] See Maisak, Survival on the Moon, pp. 133-136.

[78] See William Brian’s, Moongate, pp. 75-78.

[79] At about that time, they took still frame AS11-36-5337.

[80] Such as Sibrel’s third day image and NASA frame AS11-44-6674, according to my calculations, or images
AS11-44-6672 and 6673.

[81] See Armstrong’s statement in the Apollo 11’s crew in the technical debriefing on July 31, 1969, in Robert
Godwin’s Apollo 11: The NASA Mission Reports, Volume Two, p. 89.

[82] Richard Hoagland and Oberg squared off on the STS-48 space shuttle footage. If you have not seen that
footage, seeing it before reading this might be advisable. The STS-48 footage is the single most spectacular piece
of evidence I have ever seen regarding UFOs. The footage was taken in 1991 by the space shuttle Discovery, by a
camera that was pointing at earth. What is seen is a point of light that appears near the horizon of earth, apparently
many miles above the earth's surface. It moves in independent fashion across the earth. Its appearance and
movement alone are strange. For about fifteen seconds the object crosses the screen, then a flash lights up the
sky. Instantly, the object makes a greater-than-ninety-degree turn, launching itself into space, away from the earth.
The movement is spectacular. The object can be seen for about ten seconds after its turn, dimming slowly as it
leaves earth behind.

A few seconds after the object made its turn, something that looked like a shotgun blast came ripping up through the
atmosphere, almost exactly where the object made its turn. By all appearances, it looked like a ground-based
weapon shot at an intelligently piloted craft, which dodged the shot. That is exactly the kind of situation that Don
Corso wrote about. It is exactly the kind of activity that Steven Greer writes about, in which highly placed officials
have admitted that we are shooting at alien craft, and have even shot some down. Even the high officials think that
the “cowboys” who are shooting at non-hostile alien craft are not only stupid, but are endangering the human race if
they make the aliens angry.

The implications of that footage are profound. One reason the footage is so spectacular is that there is no debate
regarding its authenticity. The footage was beamed down-to-earth and seen live. A college student first obtained the
footage from NASA's link, and nobody has disputed the authenticity of the video, unlike nearly all the other UFO
images that have been obtained under a wide array of circumstances during the past fifty years.

If objects in the footage are the distances from the camera that they appear to be, which is many, many miles,
nobody can laugh at tales of UFOs again. Richard Hoagland has publicized the Face on Mars controversy more
than anybody else. Hoagland also presents image analysis that promotes the idea that artificial structures are on the
moon. Hoagland belongs to the school of thought that believes that UFO's are likely earth-based craft, made by
humans, by military or quasi-military organizations. Hoagland theorizes that the footage may have recorded a test of
Star Wars technology on a drone craft controlled by human beings. In late 1998, I saw Hoagland present more
shuttle footage that caught a similar “energy beam” event coming from South America. Something strange is
happening up there.

The "shotgun blast" appeared to be a much-improved variation of admitted Star Wars technology. The "blast"
appeared to be moving hundreds of miles per second. No officially admitted earthly technology can fire a projectile
that fast. The Star Wars technology could apparently fire a projectile at up to fifteen miles per second. In Corso's
The Day After Roswell, he described technology that is exactly like that "shotgun blast," and he wrote that the whole
Star Wars program was designed specifically to shoot at extraterrestrial craft. Hundreds of miles per second is far
beyond what has been made public. A craft that made that sudden turn and acceleration is far, far beyond anything
that our government has admitted to having. The turn and acceleration produced G-force and acceleration numbers
that blow the mind. The calculations show that the object was moving at Mach 73 (about 53,000 miles an hour)
before it was shot at. After the "muzzle flash" the craft instantly turned and flew away at Mach 285, for a G-force
acceleration of 14,000 G's. The most an astronaut has ever experienced is less than ten G's. That kind of nimble
maneuvering has been described by thousands of people who have seen UFOs. Subsequent analysis of the tape
has determined that the object was near the Pine Gap military base in Australia when it was shot at. Pine Gap in a
super-secret U.S. military base in the Australian outback, a perfect spot for such an awesome, ground-based
weapon to shoot at UFO's. (See Graham Stewart, "'Star Wars' over Australia?", Nexus, April-May 1996, pp. 55-56.)

Hoagland published his analysis. He ventured the opinion that the video records a Star Wars test against a drone.
Hoagland has his reasons for thinking that all we were seeing was our own stuff. Hoagland also theorizes that the
structures on Mars and the moon are ancient ruins. He has always been reluctant to admit that there might be
"aliens" among us. I tend to believe that the shuttle footage recorded a pot shot taken at an extraterrestrial craft.
The evidence argues convincingly that if we are seeing earthbound technology, it has been borrowed or stolen from
extraterrestrials.

The point of this discussion is contrasting the work of Hoagland and Oberg. Hoagland produced his analysis and
made note of possibly related issues, such as NASA ending its policy of producing live, unscrambled footage from
the shuttle, immediately after the STS-48 mission. Oberg then produced a rebuttal to Hoagland. Oberg's rebuttal
has been published on the Internet, and one place to find it is on Mike Bara's web site. Any analysis of that shuttle
footage must deal with the two most spectacular events on it: the sudden turn and acceleration of the "craft," and the
"shotgun blast" ripping through the atmosphere right behind it. Looking at the footage is necessary to understand the
nature of Oberg's analysis.

Oberg works for NASA, and like Klass is a prominent "skeptic" and august member of CSICOP. Oberg and Klass
are the two most prominent UFO debunkers in the "skeptical" movement. Oberg's analysis is quite technical
regarding the footage and space shuttle telemetry when it was taken. He made the case that the footage shows not
a craft flying hundreds of miles away over earth, but ice crystals a few feet from the shuttle's camera. He also made
the case that the "ice crystal" made its incredible turn and acceleration not due to intelligent piloting, but it was blown
that way by the firing of one of the shuttle's stabilizing rockets. That flash in the sky when the "ice crystal" turned
was not the muzzle blast of Star Wars technology, but the flash of the rocket firing.

Oberg states that the event is not occurring hundreds of miles away, but is a remarkable illusion caused by ice
crystals and a firing rocket. It was a debunker performance at its finest. Most of Oberg's points have been
effectively rebutted by Hoagland and independently by Dr. Jack Kasher, but what blew me away was what Oberg did
not see fit to discuss. Again, there are two dramatic events within seconds of each other: a dramatic turn and
acceleration of the "craft" and the "shotgun blast" that was apparently fired at it. In order to explain away the entire
event as an illusion, both have to be explained away as a remarkable series of coincidental illusions. With all the
technical talk by Oberg, he does not even mention the "shotgun blast." For his in-depth "analysis" to completely
ignore the blast, while giving reams of technical data on ancillary items, makes it a shockingly poor exercise in
debunking. Watch the video, and then read Oberg's explanation. His explanation collapses of its own weight. In
addition, image analysis expert Dr. Mark Carlotto published an analysis of the STS-48 footage in the Journal of
Scientific Exploration, Vol. 9, No. 1, pp. 45-63, 1995. It is also available on the Internet from his web site. Carlotto
makes the case that what we see in the footage is not debris near the shuttle blowing by a rocket blast, but
something in the distance, just as it appears to be. Jack Kasher also performed an intense analysis of that footage.
NASA has published its debunking of the footage, and after STS-48, they immediately and “coincidentally” stopped
allowing the public to see live shuttle footage, to protect the astronauts’ privacy.

Apparently Oberg eventually heard enough about his "critique" that he published an addendum to his explanation.
He stated that the "projectile" was an ice crystal that followed the "rocket blast," blown out by the blast and following
the other "ice crystal." There is a video produced titled UFOs and Star Wars. I got my copy from the publishing
house Adventures Unlimited. The footage can also be downloaded on the Internet. UFOs and Star Wars gives great
analysis and close ups of that footage. For one thing, those two coincidental ice crystals move in decidedly different
directions, which is questionable if they were both propelled by the same rocket blast. Another thing is that the
second crystal suddenly appears in the middle of the field of vision, looking exactly as if it came up through the
atmosphere, hundreds of miles away. If it really were an ejected ice crystal, it would not suddenly appear in the
middle of the screen, but appear in the left corner and progress across the screen. Similarly, the first "ice crystal"
can be seen moving away for about ten seconds, getting progressively dimmer as it appears to move far away from
earth. Oberg's explanation does not account for that, among other anomalies.

Also, there was a second projectile that moved across the sky when the obvious one did. There were other "ice
crystals" during that event that also made strange movements, looking as if they were other intelligently piloted craft
reacting to the Star Wars show. Oberg also defended NASA's new policy of delaying and scrambling its footage,
coming up with another rationale for government secrecy in a supposedly public agency.

Oberg could not help himself from launching inflammatory words while debunking the footage. I have rarely seen a
debunking performance that did not call its target names, seriously question their state of mind or motivation, or
make glib jokes at their target's expense. Oberg used words of certitude when critiquing Hoagland, using words
such as "invalid," "false" and "wrong," when Oberg only had a difference of opinion, garbing himself in the mantle of
rectitude while making his critique. In Oberg's essay, he inserted comments when describing Hoagland's critique,
such as "I have checked with a NASA Public Affairs official, and have personally verified, that things (as usual) are
not quite what Richard Hoagland alleges." In defending NASA's new secrecy policy, Oberg finished up with "Outside
of avoiding whines about censorship, there's no reason to do so."

I might be gentler regarding Oberg's analysis if I had not seen similar examples of his craft. Oberg was one of
Sagan's comrades in their dubious debunking effort on the Sirius-Dogon mystery. For another instance of Oberg's
efforts, an interaction with Charles Ginenthal will suffice. Ginenthal may be the most vigorous defender of Immanuel
Velikovsky's theories. I originally stumbled into Velikovsky's work and the field of catastrophism by reading
Ginenthal's Carl Sagan and Immanuel Velikovsky when I was tracking Carl Sagan's debunker career. I have gotten
into catastrophism over the past several years, and have read about 10,000 pages of material from all sides of the
controversy. Even some of Ginenthal's pro-Velikovskian comrades have called Ginenthal an apologist for
Velikovsky. Ginenthal is carrying Velikovsky's torch, but it has been a fairly honorable torch to carry, defending a
man whom the scientific establishment mercilessly derided for nearly thirty years. How right or wrong Velikovsky or
Ginenthal may be is still an open question for me, although Charles has perhaps bent too far at times in defending
Velikovsky's work.

The catastrophic issue is vast, with the Velikovskian thesis so broad and interdisciplinary that it would take many
years of study to effectively evaluate. His work delves into seemingly unrelated areas such as mythology, ancient
history, archeology, geology, space probe data, physics, astronomy, dendrochronology, glaciology and a host of
disciplines. It is not a thesis for quick study artists. Velikovsky's theories exercised Einstein's brain. Most
catastrophists do not believe Velikovsky's planetary billiards scenario of near misses between earth, Venus, Mars
and the moon, but much about his related theses are not easily dismissed. I have taken up catastrophic theory as a
hobby the past few years, getting sucked in far deeper than I had originally intended. I was merely tracking Carl
Sagan and slipped into an area that I originally had no intention of pursuing. There is plenty about catastrophic
theory to intrigue me for the rest of my life.

There is so much uncertainty and controversy surrounding Velikovsky's theses that nobody can easily and honestly
dismiss Velikovsky's work. I doubt that anyone can be an "expert" in all the areas Velikovsky tackled, including
Velikovsky. Many things often taken for granted in modern physics and cosmology, such as the Big Bang, the nature
of the Red Shift, how the planets and galaxies formed, the nature of gravity and electromagnetism, the accuracy of
dating methods such as carbon dating and dendrochronology, etc., are subject to enduring controversy.

Leroy Ellenberger has been Ginenthal's harshest critic for years. Ellenberger used to be in the Velikovsky camp,
even an assistant of Velikovsky's before he died in 1979. Ellenberger left the Velikovsky camp during the 1980's,
and has been the harshest critic of those pursuing his theories ever since. Leroy and I have corresponded many
times, as I have investigated the nature of the controversy. Leroy has been quite helpful and cordial with me,
although he is merciless in his derision of Ginenthal and other Velikovskians. I will not comment on Leroy's work
except to say that Tom van Flandern told me that he thinks part of Leroy's rage has something to do with the verve of
an apostate. Henry Bauer says the same thing in his latest book.

Ginenthal publishes his own journal that he named The Velikovskian. In the first issue of The Velikovskian,
published in 1993, Ginenthal wrote an article titled "The Moon in Upheaval," which delved into Velikovsky's theories
about the rough time our moon has had in recent history. Ginenthal responsibly fished for "expert" responses to his
work, and Oberg penned a response to Ginenthal's article on the moon. Ginenthal published Oberg's response,
along with his response to Oberg in the fourth issue of The Velikovskian. I cannot say for certain how much Oberg or
Ginenthal were "right" in their debate, but I could assess some of it. My point is not about who was right, but how the
scientific establishment reacts to fringe stuff such as Ginenthal's.
Oberg again could not contain himself from making snide comments regarding work he criticized. For instance,
Ginenthal made a case for explosive projectiles from Io's surface. Oberg's response was,

"The middle paragraph, on page 73, is probably the worst example of confusion and misrepresentation, of arrogant
ignorance, of classic pseudoscientific illogic. It refers to Io's 'tidally-induced volcanic explosions,' which eject surface
matter upward at 3000 (feet per second). 'In one second, a motionless body sitting on Io's surface will have been
struck by a force of such power that will be ejected upward to a height of 3000 feet.' First, some high school physics
student should tell Ginenthal that a body starting at zero and winding up at 3000 (feet per second) in one second will
travel only 1500 feet in the first second, not 3000 feet."

That is not unusually caustic commentary for Oberg. He is the voice of NASA on many issues, and a prominent
member of the "skeptical" movement, a movement that prides itself in its impeccable "rational" worldview and its pure
exercise of the scientific method while investigating the strange and offbeat. One might expect such pillars of
scientific reason to be far above such name-calling behavior. Unfortunately, the "skeptics" seldom are.

Oberg's attack on Ginenthal would be bad enough, with his insult about high school physics students showing
Ginenthal how wrong his analysis was, and how wanting was his understanding of rudimentary physics. Incredibly,
on that issue of those hypothetical projectile velocities, Ginenthal was correct, and Oberg dead wrong! To attack
somebody as Oberg did was indefensible, but for his critique to also be gloriously wrong moves his attack into
bizarre realms.

In his haste to insult Ginenthal, Oberg apparently forgot to think through the problem. For the kind of hypothetical
projectile Ginenthal theorized, the projectile would leave the ground at 3000 feet per second. Oberg incorrectly
assumed that the projectile would begin accelerating from a velocity of zero at ground level, accelerating like a race
car for the next second, and only reaching the 3000 feet per second velocity after accelerating for a second, and
therefore traveling only 1500 feet in that first second. That high school physics student could have told Oberg the
result of that thought experiment.

That kind of thought experiment can be tricky, and there have been many problems like that published over the years
in brainteaser books. It is a deserving problem to think about for a high school physics student, but most students
would derive an approximately correct answer, not Oberg's wrong one. For Oberg to get it wrong is no great crime,
and shows that he does not always think things through, and how our scientists are not immune from coming up with
wrong answers on relatively easy questions such as what the "muzzle velocity" would be for that hypothetical
projectile. The invective Oberg unleashed came back at him 100-fold.

Instead of firing back at Oberg in kind, Ginenthal enlisted George Talbott to compute that distance traveled in one
second by that hypothetical projectile. Talbott performed a rigorous calculation, cautioning his readers that it is not
as easy as it looks, and many scientists can come up with the wrong answer if they are not careful. Talbott
calculates a distance of 2997 feet in that first second (The Velikovskian, Vol. 1, No. 4, p. 21.). Talbott then makes
astute observations about the nature of the "scientific" criticisms of Velikovsky's work over the generations. Oberg's
performance is not unusual when criticizing Velikovsky's theories or his followers.

[83] See Greer, Extraterrestrial Contact, p. 359.

[84] See Greer, Extraterrestrial Contact, pp. 313-315.

[85] See Greer, Extraterrestrial Contact, p. 455.

[86] See Greer, Extraterrestrial Contact, pp. 32-35.

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