Government Hides Alien Moon Base!

July 01, 2009

Now that I've got your attention . . .

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

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

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

My first winner of the Pants-on-Fire Award is to former Air Force Sgt. Karl Wolfe who was referenced in a comment on this site. First listen to the YouTube video from 2001 and then we’ll separate fact from fantasy:

 

Why he gets the Pants on Fire Award

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

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

3    . 3. Sgt. Wolfe’s melodramatic account implies that a secret darkroom processed pictures from the Lunar Orbiters. In fact the data were printed in long strips that had to be pasted together to construct a full photograph. So a full picture was not “developed in the darkroom.” Despite being a photo technician, Wolfe does not demonstrate a knowledge of how the Lunar Orbiter imaging process worked, which was quite unique for its time.

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

        5. The  lunar base structure described is terribly 20^th century and out of sync with what you'd expect from entities that are so advanced they've mastered interstellar travel. Wolfe simply extrapolates form 1960s technology: the alien base has TV-broadcast style towers and dish antennas (instead of laser beam-communications or something unrecognizably advanced), greenhouses, and nuclear power plant style cooling towers (that wouldn't work in a lunar vacuum) .  True alien engineering would be as exotic and inscrutable to us as a Iphone would be to Thomas Edison.

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

What's exciting in the rational world of moon exploration is that  the NASA's   Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has sent back its first pictures, showing detail so small that you could actually see alines walking around their moon base, if such a thing existed. And, as the survey mission unfolds, the data will be readily available for anyone to go looking at the moon in detail never before seen.

Comments

[charles kafka]

you are a putz
i like and read discovery for the science. not for lack of research, and mud slinging.
oh heck with it, im going to jump up and down like an idiot, and join in your chorus, i guess that's the "new" politically correct science, and i might as well get used to it.
and thank you for well researching Carl Wolfe's work, i haven't heard of him before this moment, but im sure with your tireless research of what he went out on a limb to publish, at least what he thought was important, all us ignorant people can just sit back and relax, knowing that you... hmm looks like you forgot to sign the article. and not do any checking of references, and following through, or just looking at the base ideas behind this for ourselves

[Ray]

Let me clarify for those that may have missed it, the video from Mr. Wolfe’s testimony was originally linked on this site by a reader who alleged a government cover-up of alien artifact images that the reader described as “the most unethical act in the known earth history.”

I don’t have the hours in the day to go trolling the Internet for every wild “mud-slinging” allegation thrown at NASA about “hiding aliens.” But Mr. Wolfe was brought to my attention by the same reader as someone who is “truly enlightened,” in their words.

This warranted a rebuttal to point out inconsistencies in Mr. Wolfe's account.

I encourage “believers” to go research Mr. Wolfe’s story. People who think something as patently absurd as a 1960s-vintage alien moon base exists, can simply go online and search hundreds of scientific papers (many supposedly written by all those foreign scientists who descended on the NASA Langley research facility) and thousand of archived moon photos.

And, get ready to peruse all the publically accessible data that will come back from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. At some point the LRO will fly directly over the suspected “moon base,” and be able resolve objects as small as the size of a human.

Outlandish claims that aliens are among us have a consequence. The U.S. Congress pulled NASA funding for SETI research in the early 1990s (it was a piddling $10 million/yr). Congressional opponents of SETI cited all kinds of whacky UFO tales to question whether the search for life in space was a legitimate scientific pursuit.

With ongoing government funding we just might have actually had REAL evidence of intelligent life in space by now. But instead, the first layman to finally learn of an alien civilization could likely be the CEO of Microsoft – they’re underwriting some of the SETI research going on today.

[Nick]

*L* Sounds like the asshats in the "Alien Conspiracy/40 Year Old Virgin Club" are getting nervous. All their hopes are about to be thrown to the side of the road like a banana peel (Keep it Green, remember?)

LRO will map the entire surface of the moon in more detail than ever before. Will that "alien base" show up in THOSE photos...or will they have had time to re-locate under the surface and erase all traces of their presence?

Keep reaching for that Rainbow.

[charles kafka]

i apologize,
i wasn't' aware it was a rebuttal, not an attack.
i for one like to think i have an open mind on any subject and see where the logic leads one.
as to the 3rd comment, no worries about finding any alien bases, as long as the photographs are in black and white, and if you look at the histogram of the pictures, most of the data has been removed.. i guess us masses don't really need to know too much, and its only rocks .. right? oh well, the photographs are pretty. degraded photos are easier to hide details, or even just outright manipulate, but it will be good to get some closer maps for the first time in 40 years, even though clandestine, Hubble, and other satellites have been photographing the moon all during that time.
just please don't' be ready to jump down some one's neck, when they see things that aren't readily there. the universe will always turn out to be a bigger , more mysterious place the more one looks at it.
and please tell NASA to go out spend the money and get some color ccd cameras lol..

[Nick]

Charles, since THEY know the "masses" aren't that stupid and easily fooled (as you've so clearly shown)...WHY would they choose such an obvious way to cover their trickery? NASA as well as many other agencies have lots of very smart people, even a few might be smarter than you. Seems they would have better ways to "hide" data and other facts, don't you? How would YOU do it?

On a side note, to be taken a bit more seriously, THINK first THEN type. And to really help your cause, try proper punctuation and grammar so that your years of research don't end up looking like...well, like the ramblings of a fool.

[jamerz3294]

Is there any way we could possibly tie this into the 2012 Doomsayers as well? that way we could really make a movie and.. Wha? Oh, never mind... it's already been done. Darn.

[Dan Satterfield]

IMHO these conspiracy nuts are a ringing indictment on our educational system. There is likely nothing you can say to convince them.

Some Psych grad student could get a PhD researching this. (Suspect they already have!)

[charles kafka]

i was reading up on the LRO. no altitude data when the 5 apollo sites where imaged, so there is no way of arguing about good or bad resolutions. however i cheered also when i saw the pictures.
when it reaches its final orbital height of 33 miles
i clipped this bit off of http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9129450/NASA_s_LRO_satellite_will_offer_bird_s_eye_view_of_moon
Scientists say the 10000-by-1000 resolution images from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) will equal roughly one foot of Moon surface for every pixel. The satellite will orbit about 31 miles above the moon.
to bad nasa isn't allow to have access to whats availible on the old SR-71's, which could view a cigarette pack at 60miles + with a much better density of greys.

with much

[Rinfield]

Wow... I never realized the power of quotation marks, especially when used improperly. I thought Science was supposed to be open dialogue, but it appears that the rise of the geek in popularity has allowed geeks to become the new Jocks and trample anyone they deem inferior. By the way Nick; whilst espousing your own technical supremacy, deriding the idea of open dialogue and correcting the grammar of your interlocutor, you may want to review how to handle what you would consider sentence two in your very incisive vitriolic missive. Everyone else... this was a great article, and if you actually are as superior to those you are attempting to attack... why attack them??? Leave well enough alone, everyone sees whomever they choose as a fool. There is little changing that.