This isn’t an alien rant… aliens aren’t anymore rant-worthy than leeks or sparrows.

Have you ever had to convince anybody that aliens exist somewhere in our mediocre universe? Even Dawkins thinks they do. (But then, he’s an agnostic these days, apparently.)

No, this is the rant that you pull out when you’re feeling outrageous… Lokean.

Unlike other aspects of the whisky rant, which require explanation and a certain degree of winning over to your way of thinking, this component hangs off the side, alone… and all it requires is eyesight.

Well, eyesight and a certain willingness to associate with some properly fringe worldviews. But we don’t mind risking a few bull shark encounters around here so let’s swim out past the breakers and be done with it:

There are vastly ancient, ruined structures on the surface of our moon.

That’s it.

No need for the how, no need for the whom, no need for Cydonia, no need for the when, no need for Roswell, no need for the why, no need for the Nazis (Sidebar: awesome), no need for the Rendlesham Forest Incident, no need for inventing a wacky new version of physics.

This is like the geological age of the Sphinx. Until a satisfactory orthodox explanation can be found, the photographic evidence proves there are artificial structures on the moon. The onus is on them. We just need to use our eyes. So settle in and lube up those eyeballs, as this is a video-heavy post.

The fashionability of the weird

It’s only comparatively recently that making such a bold assertion would immediately cast you out into the lunatic fringes of society.

Let’s put this in some context.

The moon has bugged people out for quite some time… centuries, in fact. Here are a couple of summaries of moonish weirdness and alternabeliefs of varying degrees of outlandishness. (Caution: bull sharks.)

• Lunar Mysteries
• What’s going on out there?

Moving it closer to home, even between the wars it was widely believed that there was advanced life on Mars. Tesla wanted to flash bright lights to attract their attention, the New York Times wanted to carve Pythagoras’s Theorem onto the Siberian steppes so it could be viewed from space. On August 23, 1924 there was a day of worldwide radio silence as Mars was the closest to Earth it had been in more than a century. Everyone from the military down to amateur radio nerds listened in.

Despite what you may read on Wikipedia, it’s very possible they actually received something:

On the day of radio silence, C. Francis Jenkins, who had invented an experimental television system, turned a crude TV camera at Mars’ closest approach. Jenkins pointed this camera at Mars on the day of radio silence. His camera filmed a signal containing a face and symbols coming from the planet. He and astronomer David Todd sent the film to the nation’s cryptology expert, William Friedman.

As noted, William Friedman was not only a cryptologist, he was also the Chief Codes Officer, and reported to the Chief Signals Officer of the U.S. Army. So, the military was contacted. The Army also admitted that on the same day they also had received signals from Mars. The following is a quote from Captain John Ferriter of the Signal Corps:

‘The signal consisted of dashes of 6 seconds duration, with intervals of 7 seconds followed by a voice repeating words of 1-4 syllables.’

The Jenkins/Friedman film disappeared and was not discovered until a few years ago when a reporter found it in the archives of the Virginia Military Institute. The film has been reviewed by at least one avowed UFOologist, Dr. Elaine Bickle. In interviews and lectures Dr. Bickle has stated:

” I have seen the original ‘film.’ It is beyond doubt a communication from Mars.”

Unfortunately, the film has again gone missing, without explanation for the disappearance of the 1924 film or for the disappearance of papers reporting whether or not William Friedman ever deciphered the code.

Spend enough time looking at this and you’ll note that space film has a tendency to go missing. More on this later.

During the Second World War, Churchill’s main reason for not disclosing that Allied aircraft were repeatedly encountering UFOs was because “the British public has enough to deal with.”

It was wartime pragmatism rather than a deliberate misinformation campaign.

This was to soon change with Eisenhower’s murky creation of NASA out of a peculiar combination of postwar scientific optimism, Nazi technology/technologists and the now-infamous Brookings Report. Famous-among-Pagans anthropologist, Margaret Mead, was one of its co-authors. Recalling her experience of what happens to traditional societies when they encounter western ones (they get fucked), she essentially recommended the government lie about alien discoveries.

So there you have it. Baked into the birth of the greatest exploratory organisation mankind has ever created is a policy of not telling us what they find if they don’t think we’re up to it. And so commenced 60 years of running two space programmes:

• The real one which very likely includes encounters with ancient alien tech.
• The public or ‘boring’ one which is about moon rocks and involves destroying or altering photographic evidence.

Here’s someone who worked for NASA talking precisely about removing evidence from moon photos because his team was in charge of it. (A more extensive interview with Ken Johnston can be found here.)

Incidentally, having artificial structures show up repeatedly in your photos may neatly explain why you would fake a moon landing after going to the tremendous expense of actually flying out there in the first place. You are guaranteed a clean set of prints.

I’m not the only one to follow this line of thinking. Coming in the top 3 ‘persons Gordon would most like to be’, Chris Knowles of The Secret Sun says this:

“And given the highly specialized and regimented nature of a giant bureaucracy like NASA, the only people who needed to be in on the scam would be the high echelon in Mission Control and the astronauts themselves.We all know there is a secret space program; the only question is how deep it all goes. My assumption has always been that there were two missions, showtime with the Apollo and a real mission, using much more serious military hardware that’s a lot bigger, heavier and much less telegenic. I doubt very much that the real mission involved much golf playing or picture taking.”

Recall, of course, that the Apollo 11 film has mysteriously ‘gone missing’. To me, this is akin to losing the Declaration of Independence or the Magna Carta: impossible if not done deliberately.

Show and tell

In terms of presenting the dominant pseudohistoric (and overly pseudoscientific) case for artificial structures on the moon then look no further than Richard Hoagland’s infamous 2007 address to the National Press Club. It covers the physics of building in glass, it covers the specific film NASA used for its expeditions, it covers their repeated photo tampering. It’s the whole shebang in a ninety minute block.

And it was on YouTube. A few weeks ago they were all online but now seem to be passworded behind some preposterous, trite, also-ran ‘online mystery school’ that isn’t even live yet. I’ll let you know if I find an accessible version. (You especially want to watch part 13 if you can.) Update: It’s no longer passworded, so watch this one:

Instead, feel free to watch the ‘classic’ 1994 presentation which put him on the map when you have a few hours even just to see how pseudohistorical beliefs evolve over time.

In lieu of the full address, you can get a pretty decent rundown of Hoagland’s positing from this recent interview (embed), starting at around 12 minutes.

Project Camelot interviews Richard Hoagland – Part 2 of 3 from Peter Petrelli on Vimeo.

As far as getting better images of the lunar structures, you’ll find these in the relevant article on Hoagland’s website. (Sidebar: Is there an inverse correlation between the hideousness of a pseudohistorian’s website and their personal awesomeness? Because both this and Hancock’s website ming like a vase.)

Tying it all together -complete with Nazis, Egyptian gods, JFK and alternative models of physics- is this recent presentation from Hoagland’s Dark Mission co-author. (There’s stuff about Jack Parsons in there too which is worth geeking over.)

Dark Mission: The Secret History of NASA from Joseph Jordan on Vimeo.

It’s possible I’m being a bit mean to these guys here, as the gods know I give other pseudohistorians more leeway. And in fact, one theory I’ve come round on upon reexamination is to do with ‘astronaut tampering’.

Sure it sounds crazy if you say they’ve had their memories wiped but that’s actually not necessary. Now, I’m just putting this out there but… recall, again, that we are talking about the decade of clandestine LSD experiments, spies and communist propaganda. What spun it for me was this:

• Astronaut recall of physically being on the moon is almost universally ‘third person’, like what happens to a trauma survivor or when you try to remember your early childhood but aren’t sure if you’re confusing it with photos of the day.
• When asked what walking on the moon “felt” like, Buzz Aldrin immediately fled the stage and vomited in an alley. Felt. What it felt like.

You don’t need a mind-erasing raygun. You just need a decent shrink and a lot of LSD.

Hoagland, for what it’s worth, thinks Neil Armstrong is the only one with full recall and he’s the one who never talks about being on the moon. In the interview embedded above he tells the story of when Armstrong was a guest of honour at the White House in 1994. At the end of his speech he turns to the assembled high school students and says:

“There are wonders beyond belief on the moon for those who can remove truth’s protective layers.”

Two things. Officially there aren’t wonders beyond belief on the moon. It’s boring. And since when does truth practice safe sex? Earlier in his speech he referred to his fellow astronauts as “parrots”. Ostensibly this is because parrots don’t fly well… but parrots certainly do something else really well. Repeat what they are told.

A self-correcting heresy

My opinion is that this is a self-correcting heresy. China and especially India quite simply could give a fuck about protecting hillbilly religious beliefs to do with Adam and Eve and whatever the Republicans are braying on about today. (In fact, Hinduism has to be the most alien-friendly of all the great world religions.)

It will be a pleasant day if we all wake up one morning and the Times of India -one of my favourite foreign papers because of its open attitude to Forteana- is reporting on the discovery of structures on the moon.

That’s if China doesn’t beat them to it. The real reason I moved this section of the whisky rant up a week or so was because China, earlier in the month, released the highest-ever resolution images of the moon. Can’t wait to see what the pseudos do with these!

So other, wealthier governments are on their way to the moon. Where it gets really interesting is that NASA wants ‘no fly/no drive’ zones around all of its landing sites. Their reasoning is laughable. Historical sites my ass. Where are the fucking Apollo 11 tapes if you care so much about history? Something is very much up. For once I’m glad that China will pay absolutely no attention to the demands of another power.

It probably won’t be as spectacular as this delightful fake, but we can always hope. Note: the narration isn’t fake and is unrelated. (Also note the top comment: racist but still kinda funny.)

Switching from whisky to wine

There is something about the idea that there are million-year-old ruins on the moon that drops my blood pressure. It relaxes me to know we are small, brief and pointless while the universe is the complete opposite of all three.

Your troubles become smaller, your aspirations become more beautiful, you become more precious.

Unlike the other components of the whisky rant which will essentially chart a magico-pseudohistorical narrative from the beginning of life on earth through to the development of modern humans to the earliest civilisations and on to the tumble down of those first spiritual ideas… this one… if it turns out to be correct… doesn’t really plug in anywhere. It’s most likely not part of our story. It’s part of somebody else’s story… some other creatures on their way through the universe like us.

This pleases me. It pleases me to know that we are in no way special or unprecedented. It’s like sitting outside on a warm night with a glass of wine, looking up and just getting lost in it all.

So let’s close out with some words from Illyria, talking about her life millions of years ago.

“I traveled all of them as I pleased. I walked worlds of smoke and half-truths, intangible. Worlds of torment and of unnamable beauty. Opaline towers as high as small moons. Glaciers that rippled with insensate lust. And one world with nothing but shrimp. I tired of that one quickly.”