Moondust: In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth

  It gets so much worse, though. With the U.S. budget deficit running at record levels and growing as Bush speaks, and the war in Iraq complicating what looks set to become a perpetual “war on terrorism,” $11 billion of the $12 billion on offer will come from redirecting existing NASA funds. Sensible to some degree perhaps, but a week later anguished cries will be issuing from scientists and astronomers as it becomes apparent that this redirection will mean ditching the Hubble Space Telescope early. More concerning still, when the new spaceship is ready, someone’s going to have to pay for those trips to the Moon and beyond, and only at that stage will an abrupt injection of untold billions of dollars be required … so the Chief only has to find an extra one billion dollars over five years, leaving his successors to cough up the necessary hundreds of billions – or more likely cancel the damn thing, or simply let it slide. This “plan” might just as easily have issued from the Union of Persian Storytellers.

  When I ask Cernan for his reaction to the speech, he expresses himself “elated,” but in effect, all President Bush has said about going back to the Moon and on to Mars is that it’d be nice to do it one day when he’s not in office and someone else is responsible. In the end, it’s as I thought: for a Republican president, space is the ultimate zipless fuck. It’s Vision on account in an election year, when two ingenious NASA Rovers have rekindled public interest in Mars. Almost immediately, the former NASA and now Duke University historian Alex Roland is telling CNN that this new Moonage daydream is a distraction and waste of resources. My new friend Andy Chaikin is there, too, disagreeing passionately, and I wish I could set my skepticism aside and believe along with him, but I can’t.

  And I’m not alone. Although it can appear otherwise, the American electorate is not stupid. Within days, a New York Times/CBS News poll is indicating that 58 per cent of Americans think building a permanent base on the Moon is not worth the risk and cost, while 35 per cent say it is. More significantly, only 17 per cent of people polled felt that their nation was spending too little on space, implying that 83 per cent consider current expenditure to be enough or too much – and that’s not going to get anyone to the Moon, much less Mars. As the New York Times noted in an article about the prospective $500 billion budget deficit: “The virtue of the space mission is that Congress can abandon it long before the heaviest spending is required.” In which case, NASA could spend the next decade developing another gilded rocket ship with no place to go, a ghost craft whose rationale has drifted away on the solar wind by the time it’s ready – exactly like Nixon’s shuttle and Reagan’s ISS. A cartoon underneath the Times article imagines the president delivering his State of the Union address a week later. “And we know the Martians have tried to buy uranium from Neptune,” he’s saying. Which probably is the kind of thing it will take to get us there in the near future. The twelve Apollo Moonwalkers aren’t going to be replaced just yet.

  9

  Flight

  By the time I’ve found documentarian Bart Sibrel in Nashville and convinced him that I’m not a federal agent, there is a phrase that I’ve come to dread above all others.

  Under normal circumstances, the comment, “Oh, I’d really like to talk to you about that!” would carry little threat, might even be pleasant, but over the months its appearance has come to mean two things to me: one, that someone has just mentioned this book, and two, that sure as werewolves howl, the words “Do you really think they went? Because I’m not so sure” are about to follow. From any group of five informed, intelligent people, at least one is likely to punt this into a conversation, with the proportion of doubters increasing as the mean age of the group decreases.

  It’s not just the young, either. When I met Robert Plant in a bar in Worcester, we chatted amiably about where Led Zeppelin were playing on that night in 1969 (unromantically, Cleveland) and about the unexpected success of their first two albums that year and of the solace his generation of musicians, raised on postwar rationing, found in the alien strains of black American music. I loved hearing him say:

  “When I heard Chuck Berry singing, relating to a youth culture which sounded so gregarious and switched on … it was like a calling, like someone blowing a horn on the top of a mountain. The thing about our generation was that there was no conveyor belt that brought this stuff to us – and I think for that reason, when you found what you liked, it wasn’t a casual affair, it was intense …”

  When he talked about how little he enjoyed the Seventies, about how all the joy and freedom and spontaneity of making music disappeared for him as the stakes and scale increased, he sounded remarkably like the flight director John Hodge talking about NASA and space in the same period. Then I mentioned those greatest-hits CD sleeves which offer the group in Apollo space suits, wondering what they meant to him and telling him a little more about my travels, and before I’d even got to Ed’s strolling dentures or Bill’s space brown-out, along it rumbled like a miscued bass line …

  “Oh, I’d really like to talk to you about that!”

  No!

  “Yes, I never really believed they went, to be honest with you.”

  Led Zeppelin used the image because they thought it looked cool, that was all.

  I thought this might be a European thing until word arrived that NASA was hearing the same story from teachers – that when they bring America’s Finest Hour to class, a couple of wiseacre kids always raise their hands to declare: “But, ma’am, my dad says it was all a trick.” The teachers asked what they should say to this (they didn’t know?) and NASA decided to commission a book from their former employee James Oberg, which would provide the answers. How tremendously sage, one might think – but no. When word got out about NASA’s belated attempt at a rebuttal, the whole world, including the half that had always believed them, cried, “The spaceman doth protest too much, me- thinks!” Poor NASA dropped the book like a hot Moonrock and conspiracy theorists hailed a great victory. The Man, it seemed, was scared.

  The godfather of hoax theorists was an old bird named Bill Kaysing, who spent seven years working for the NASA contractors Rocketdyne during the Sixties and once filed a malicious libel suit against former spaceship and tugboat commander Jim Lovell of Apollo 13 for calling his ideas “wacky.” His line is similar to the one floated in the notorious 1978 sci-fi film Capricom One, which starred Elliott Gould and – oh, conspiracy joy! –O. J. Simpson: that the space agency panicked when Kennedy set his decade’s end deadline, and decided to shadow Apollo proper with an Apollo Simulation Project. Kaysing’s scenario has since been developed further by a pair of Brits named David Percy and Mary Bennett in a tome called Dark Moon. Their central thesis is that American astronauts did go to the Moon on a secret military mission, but that radiation killed them, as NASA knew it would. Consequently, the ones we know are front men. Actors. Fakes. It’s a great story. A full account of my attempts to meet David Percy, who now lives in France, would read like a passage from a Graham Greene novel and eventually recedes into a fog of suspicious questions and identity checks and furtive promises which are whipped away at the last moment. In the end, they issue me with a statement confirming what I already know about them and their ideas.

  Bart Sibrel’s video is called A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Moon, and is billed as containing lost footage of the Apollo 11 crew preparing for a telecast which NASA sold as “en route to the Moon,” but was clearly not. The claim is that this “previously unseen downlink footage” shows them setting up the illusion of trans-lunar space as they guiltily circle over the Earth. After leaving John Young in Houston, I’d managed to find a number for Sibrel, on whose answerphone I’d left a message, but received no reply. Then one day a video of the film, in European format, landed mysteriously on my doorstep. A conspiracy lord had finally stepped out of the shadows.

  Some of the film is clever, if clichéd. Narrated by an English woman who sounds unnervingly like Margaret Thatcher, the story begins with a barrage of biblical quotes and examples of hu
man pridefulness and hubris, culminating in Nixon’s excitable proclamation as he greeted the Apollo 11 crew on the deck of the carrier Hornet that this was “the greatest week in the history of the world since the Creation” – a claim which had his evangelist chum Billy Graham angrily firing off a list of greater weeks, starting with the first Christmas. There follow some amusing scenes of rockets blowing up, to the accompaniment of Dinah Washington’s upbeat rendition of “Destination Moon,” with every stab of brass cueing another detonation. Then the famous footage of Apollo 11 lifting off is cut with soldiers being dragged through the Vietnam mud, Biafrans starving, Martin Luther King marching, students being beaten, a Buddhist monk immolating himself in protest at the war.

  Now the arguments: first, that solid lead shielding would have been necessary to protect astronauts from the allegedly lethal radiation of the Van Allen radiation belt, which shields Earth from the sun and is now believed to have been as fundamental to the evolution of sentient life as water. The narrator draws our attention to supposed anomalies in the lighting of lunar photographs, suggesting a light source other than the sun, and to the lack of a burn crater under the lunar module, before some film of the astronauts’ famous loping gait is speeded up to look like people trotting. Then there’s the “lost footage,” which shows Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins laughing and smiling as they set up a shot out of the Command Module window. It’s spooky and unsettling, but not because of anything they’re doing: what perturbs is the fact that they seem relaxed and at ease, as if out of character. There follows a baroque call to arms – for “the true patriots of America” to “rise up and free its citizens” from a gangrenous and sin-laden federal government, before we’re left with quotes from George Orwell (“whoever controls the past controls the future”) and Shakespeare (“truth will out”), and a vision of Jackie Kennedy scrambling across a Cadillac with her husband’s brain peppering the upholstery.

  Sibrel turns out to be disconcertingly bright and articulate. In carefully measured terms, he urges me to see the sobriety of his position before its zaniness, noting correctly that a faked Apollo landing would be of far more historical significance than a real one.

  “That being the case,” he proclaims, “the truth has still not come out and humanity has been robbed of this profound event and our nation’s greatest heroes are liars. We were prideful and juvenile, wouldn’t admit that we couldn’t do it.”

  And I tell him that I think Apollo was probably prideful and juvenile any way you look at it, at which point we run through all the arguments about the flag which looks like it’s blowing in the wind when there is no wind on the Moon, the discontinuity of the technology (“you can bet that if we’d gone to the Moon thirty-three years ago, we’d have bases there by now”), the supposedly inconsistent shadows cast by rocks and dearth of stars in the photos. All of these have simple explanations – wire in the flag, politics, sun reflecting from the Earth, the different lighting conditions on a relatively small body with no atmosphere – but like conspiracy theorists everywhere, when one argument is sinking, Sibrel merely hops to another, like a lumberjack riding logs on a river. Until there is a credible way of explaining why the defeated Soviets chose to keep America’s guilty secret through the next three and a half decades, such niggling contentions amount to nothing in any case. Listen to Sibrel address the geopolitics of this problem and there comes a point where the sight of Keanu Reeves flying toward you in a long black robe would engender no surprise at all, because you are now in the presence of a global conspiracy theory that makes The Matrix seem like Jane Austen.

  Through it all, I’m trying to gauge whether he really believes what he’s saying, but there’s no way of knowing. The only thing I feel sure of is that he wants to believe this story, the way Plant believed in Blues, Bean in Art, Schmitt in Capitalism, Young in Progress, Dotty in God, me in Dotty, Ed in pet psychics. Perhaps in the end, arguments don’t matter as much as we think they do: what really counts is the story. And just when I think Sibrel’s particular version of this story can’t get any better, it does. He’s talking about how things can become so familiar that you look right at them without really seeing them, when he says:

  “And as Kubrick actually suggested in his last film, when that happens you’ve got your ‘Eyes Wide Shut.’ ”

  Kubrick again! Like a character from Dr. Seuss, he just keeps coming back. There was von Braun and Dr. Strangelove, 2001 and Nixon and the shuttle (and Apollo 16 Command Module Pilot Ken Mattingly drifting solo with his Strauss waltzes from the movie, having seen it six times). There was Also Sprach Zarathustra absolutely bloody everywhere, Michael Collins revealing that he called his simulator instructor “HAL” and the story Ed Mitchell told about one of his young daughters being introduced to Henry Kissinger and Kirk Douglas at the White House, only to blurt to the actor: “I didn’t like you in Spartacus,” which Kubrick directed. There was the disillusioned tramp in A Clockwork Orange. Now there’s Eyes Wide Shut, which Sibrel takes to contain a cheeky last message from the master and supposed director of the lunar illusion.

  “Something to consider,” he points out in a low voice, “is that, although he died before it was released, Kubrick had contractually stipulated that that movie had to open on a particular date … and do you know what date that was?”

  Surprise me.

  “The thirtieth anniversary of the first landing on the Moon.”

  Remarkably, this appears to be true.

  When I rake over conspiracists with the space historian Jim Oberg, he talks ominously of hoax theory as “exercise of the immune system,” calling it “an intellectual bug that is attempting to infect the current culture … and the way that the culture handles it will tell us a great deal about the strength of the culture.” He adds that the most effective argument lunar-hoax theorists have is that we don’t go to the Moon anymore.

  Here’s what it says to me, though.

  From the moment humans were capable of wondering where they came from, they must also have asked where the Moon came from and why it was there. In time, they noticed the subtle spell it cast over the Earth; that it turned the tides (though Galileo declared this a wives’ tale) and influenced the mating habits of animals; that its cycle mirrored the cycle of women and sexual activity increased around its fullness; that it was beautiful, like an eye winking from heaven, and occasionally did magical things, like swallow the sun or acquire a fiery halo during eclipses. At the very least, it allowed you to walk home after a beery night in the village without falling in a ditch and, for the same reason, Luna still frowns on war – when she’s full, the element of surprise is lost, and there’s not a military commander on Earth who can do a damn thing about it, any more than King Canute could turn the tide: generals in the last Gulf War had to obey her just as did their forebears.

  She’s inspired myth and legend in nearly all cultures, and when you look at these collectively, they’re like a love letter from humanity to the Universe, whose constant themes are love, sex, madness, jealousy, romance, magic, treachery … things that we fear but are eternally drawn to anyway. She is born each month, waxes to maturity, wanes and dies: the Moon’s attraction as a metaphor is not hard to fathom.

  And now, the more I look at it, the more I wonder whether the conspiracy theories are our modern, technocratic Moon mythology. Unlike the ancients, we know that the light in our sky can’t be the Chinese goddess Chang O mourning the mortal lover she was tricked into leaving behind on Earth, or the head of Coyolxauhqui, severed and slung into the night by her Aztec sun god brother as punishment for betraying her mother, or Europa making love to the sun. We know this because science tells us, the same way we know that it’s not demons or spirits who manipulate us with Cold Wars, force our young to die as soldiers in mystifying conflicts on the other side of the world, or shoot them if they protest; or who spy on us and take our money, break into rival parties’ headquarters for political advantage, or spin information to occlude its meaning. The powers which
plague us belong to states, governments and their friends in business … so why wouldn’t our modern folklore revolve around them, too? And what more evil trick could this all-seeing, all-powerful and yet somehow utterly clueless leviathan play than telling us that they – that we – did this magical thing, waltzed into the stars and set down on the Moon, when we never actually did?

  From this point on, I see a fresh continuity in the story of Apollo. Sibrel claims that “Neil Armstrong started shaking like a leaf when I asked him to swear on the Bible,” but I’m not sure whether to believe this. I absolutely do believe him, however, when he admits that yes, that right hook from Aldrin back in LA really did hurt.

  When all other argument is exhausted, conspiracy believers inevitably draw your attention to one thing: the sullen, peevish withdrawal of Neil Armstrong from public life. It seems doubly strange to me, then, that only days after finally chasing down Sibrel, I find myself en route to Portugal and a rare opportunity to see the first Moonwalker speak – even though that’s not why I’m going. In fact, the Moonwalker I’m really hoping to find, David Scott, makes Armstrong look like Robin Williams and has so far eluded me completely.