Page 236 - Lunacy and the Age of Deception

Are you detecting a pattern here? How do you get Americans with the Christian morals of the middle
class of the 1960s to take part in a deception without asking them to tell outright lies? You persuade
them that it is not really lying if they state the truth in such a way that people understand it to mean
just the opposite. The deception is just as much present, but these individuals can console themselves
with the thought that they did not tell outright lies. Can’t you hear them now?

“I said I couldn’t believe it was really happening. I said it was ‘unreal’ and ‘fantastic.’”

“Me too. I told the reporters that what I saw was ‘unbelievably perfect.’”

“Oh yes, I also told the reporters that I felt like I was watching another simulation. I cannot help it
if they misconstrued my words to mean something other than what I said.”

Added to these examples, we have the following words from two other Apollo astronauts.

“Although we were far from home, we were a lot closer to it than the pure distance might indicate.”
Michael Collins

Eugene Cernan was also prone to use expressions such as, “I was the last to call the Moon my
home.”

Aside from the anomalous behavior of the astronauts and their wives, the space program itself has
been full of contradictions. It has not performed as one would expect a normal technology program
to behave. Its history defies normal patterns of technological development and maturation. Consider
the following.

Since the last Apollo Mission in 1972 when men reportedly traveled 240,000 miles from the surface
of the Earth, no manned mission has gone more than 600 miles from Earth, and the majority of
missions have gone no more than 200 miles from the Earth’s surface. If men had actually gone to
the Moon, this would certainly appear to be a great anomaly. When one considers the tremendous
advances in technology which have occurred in the past 44 years, it is difficult to conceive that men
have ventured no further than 1/1000th of the distance they had achieved more than 4 decades ago.

To put this in perspective let us compare the history of manned space flight to the technological
progress of the airplane. The first claimed manned space flight occurred on April 12, 1961 when
Soviet Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin made a single orbit of the Earth at an altitude of 91 miles which
lasted for 108 minutes. 8 years later, NASA reportedly sent men all the way to the Moon, where they
disembarked their space craft, walked about on the Moon, collected samples, planted a flag, held a
phone call with the American President, spent 22 hours on the lunar surface, and then blasted off and
returned to Earth, having spent a total of 8 days in space.

The first powered flight of man in an airplane occurred on December 17, 1903. The longest flight
by the Wright brother’s that day was 852 feet and lasted 59 seconds. If we go forward 8 years, the
span of time from Yuri Gagarin’s initial orbit of the Earth to Apollo 11, we find that airplane
development had made steady, if not spectacular, progress. Newspaper publisher William Randolph
Hearst offered $50,000 to the first person who could fly across the United States coast to coast within