REAL OR FAKE? SHALL WE FIND
OUT FOR SURE?
It’s been forty years since NASA’s Apollo program electrified the world by putting astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the Moon on July 21st, 1969, and then returning them with fellow Apollo 11 crewman Michael Collins safely to earth. This fabulous accomplishment is one of the foundations of the American psyche; it is part of what defines us. It’s part of what makes us proud of our country and, by extension, proud of ourselves.
Although we were all thrilled by the television coverage of the Apollo 11 mission, and particularly the astonishingly bad video sent back from the lunar surface, it wasn’t long before questions were raised about the authenticity of those scenes that had initially held us so completely spellbound. Personally, I simply ignored the nay-sayers whenever I ran across them. Nobody likes to have a cherished belief seriously challenged. And for many people this resistance also covers their belief in NASA and the space program, the government itself, people they voted for, and so on. We’re talking about sacred territory.
The arrival of the Internet, an “earth change” that has terrified the world’s ruling class since the first private website went on line, began my personal experience of re-education regarding the Apollo program. If you dig around for the good stuff, you’ll find serious material such as this commentary on the use of wires to partially suspend the astronauts and give them the appearance of low gravity. But I still didn’t want to believe the moonwalk video was faked.
It took a blast of serious humor to finally wake me up. I
guess it has been several years since I ran across this outrageously funny
video. It depicts a studio accident disrupting the original filming of the
Apollo 11 moonwalk. If you haven’t seen it, click on the image at right
and prepare for a big laugh. Although it was offered to the world as film
smuggled out of the NASA studios, I understand that folks who are familiar with
the suits and equipment used in the Apollo program have pretty much established
that it is not authentic. Nonetheless, I can only applaud the folks that put a
lot of time and effort into such a delightful project!
It was the wonderful humor in that video that finally persuaded me that I should try to pin down, at least for my own peace of mind, whether or not the original Apollo 11 moonwalk video was real or fake. And I had to admit, of all the people over the years who had questioned the official story, none had better tools than I to discover the truth.
The value of Reversed Speech is that it is self-verifying. The existence of the discovered words and phrases can be verified by anyone with a reasonably good sound editor (including some try-before-you-buy shareware programs). Only the human mind can weave backward phrases into forward speech so that you can’t detect them normally. Coupled with the fact that the subconscious cannot lie, clear speech reversals can establish what really happened in virtually any situation – and leave absolutely no room for doubt.
If I wanted to know the truth about the Apollo 11 moonwalk videos there would be no better source than the crew of Apollo 11 themselves. They returned to earth on July 24th, but were placed in quarantine immediately. Today I wonder if the three weeks of isolation was used to make sure everyone was on the same page, but we’ll probably never know. What we do have is audio and video of the Houston press conference held when they emerged from quarantine on August 12th. For my investigation I used the video of the full press conference, including reporters’ questions, found here.
Many people have remarked that the astronauts, especially Armstrong, seemed to be behaving oddly at this first public event. In fact, if you are watching for it, you will see that they are enthusiastic when discussing the voyage to the Moon, and the return trip, but oddly subdued when talking about operations on or near the Moon. There appears to be tension, anger, disappointment or depression, and other feelings that are very much at odds with what should have been a triumphant celebration and homecoming.
My purpose was to learn about the authenticity of the videos, films and photos that were taken on the lunar surface. Because of the nature of reversed speech, I simply watched the press conference proceed while waiting for any specific mention of films or videos. If there was anything special or unusual about them, informative speech reversals would likely occur at the point where the films were specifically mentioned.
A good opportunity appeared quickly. After a rambling introduction in which Neil Armstrong appears to be trying to disassociate himself and his crew from what the audience is about to see, he says that the press conference will not follow the normal pattern. Instead, it will be a film and slide show with the astronauts providing a narrative.
I zeroed in on this direct reference to FILMS and found an amazing set of speech reversals. They clearly indicate that something was very wrong.
There’s not much doubt here about what it is that Armstrong believes is faked. In fact it would be good enough for me. However, on the off chance that a speaker might be thinking of something else, I routinely look for a second occurrence when a particular reversal is likely to take on great import. Often we’ve found confirmation from a second person. In this case, though, it is Armstrong taking the lead in the narration, and so the next direct reference to a FILM is also his.
This occurs near the end of the moonwalk segment, when Armstrong says, "This FILM shows our final look at Tranquility Base before our departure." Listen to what was audible when I slowed and reversed that sentence:
FAKES IT and FAKE FILM pretty much lock down the answer to all those questions about the authenticity of the Apollo 11 moonwalk imagery. To understand the value of multiple references, note the BUZZ SCARED reversal. Without another instance, we can't be sure if Armstrong is recalling that Buzz was scared during the lift-off from the lunar surface, or if he is scared “now” that someone may see something in the films that would prove they are fakes. Another reference would likely pin this down.
Happily enough, I had satisfied my own curiosity about the moonwalk imagery, and with surprisingly little effort. My real challenge was to decide what I should do with the information now that I had found it.
But how would other people feel? We are talking about something that is virtually a national icon. Worse yet, I wasn’t really sure whether I’d uncovered actual fraud or simply a panic-driven answer to some simple problem, like a failure of the video systems aboard the Lunar Module. There was at least one transmission from Apollo 11 from a point between the Earth and the Moon that seemed to focus on problems with a video camera.
Eventually I decided not to publish what I’d found. I’m as fond of the Apollo 11 story as the next guy, and I was sure there was some reasonable explanation. There were many indications that the astronauts were not happy with the way it all turned out, but if Neil Armstrong could keep the secret, so could I.
NASA also took this
opportunity to announce that the original telemetry tapes which captured the
moonwalk videos as they were transmitted from the moon were lost forever. Oddly
enough, I read four different versions of the story and they all differed in
some significant way. It was very much as if different versions had been
released to find out which one the public would find most acceptable.
The one that punched my personal hot-button claimed the tapes had been in the National Archives. Now I don’t know about you, but I’m thoroughly sick of the way really important evidence just disappears in this country, especially material held in the supposedly sacrosanct National Archives. All the forensic evidence from the 1963 coup that put Lyndon Johnson in the oval office disappeared from the Archives. And it hasn’t been that long since Sandy Berger, Clinton’s National Security Advisor, was caught removing documents from the Archives, presumably to destroy them.
From Waco to Oklahoma City and the highly unlikely drama of 9-11, crucial evidence relating to our nation’s history has disappeared just as fast as Uncle Sam can make it go away. It is such an arrogant and insulting abuse of power that I think I would gladly cheer for anyone planning to bring down the central government if they would just promise to open all the files and make them public!
So it didn’t take a lot of time for me to decide that I should revisit the Apollo 11 mission, dig out whatever additional information I might find there, and publish it for the people who are interested in truth. After all, I’ve got the best investigative tools on the planet, and thanks to our donors a good platform for sharing what I find. Might as well use it!
First, let’s review what we know. There are three types of original imagery related to Apollo 11: video transmitted from the lunar surface, 16mm movie film shot by the astronauts and returned to earth in the command module, and some surprisingly professional-looking still photos shot by the astronauts using their Hasselblad still cameras.
NASA’s credibility
on images sent back from surveyor craft is so low that I won’t waste any time at
all on recent photos supposedly showing the Apollo landing sites. NASA’s
penchant for airbrushing things in and out of their photos is legendary,
especially here in Houston.
Armstrong told us that the films the audience was viewing in Houston in 1969 were faked. I was investigating the video images beamed back from the moon, but now I’m wondering if these were even shown at the press conference. They were horrible in terms of quality, and certainly nothing to be proud of. And there were credibility issues. Supposedly, the Lunar Lander had an antenna that was too small to transmit decent video, yet the images it transmitted of the descent phase were perfectly acceptable.
Reviewing the press conference once again, I think it’s unlikely that those original videos from Tranquility Base were even shown. If they were, then they would have begun with the One-Small-Step video and there would have been a standing ovation that would have lasted for some time. There was nothing like that at all.
That means the images of astronauts on the lunar surface while Armstrong was speaking that day were almost certainly from the 16mm motion picture film that has been the primary visual documentation for the Apollo 11 mission for forty years. So I want to pin down who actually appears in those films, where they were made and, if I’m lucky, who made them.
Armstrong can see the screen to his left. As the film shifts to scenes taken on the ground he is still reading a very elaborate explanation of why he and Aldrin delayed an extra hour before climbing down from the lander. There must be a reason why NASA thought this needed extra emphasis. For instance, if they’d just discovered they couldn’t transmit live TV, then time would be needed to hook up with pre-recorded imagery.
Whatever the reason for it, Armstrong doggedly tries to complete the explanation while at the same time he is becoming increasingly distracted by the film being projected to his left. You can hear him stumbling through his lines in the audio clip below.
This period of distraction produced one of the richest sets of speech reversals I’ve ever run across. And the contents are pretty amazing!
This material is so rich that I hardly know where to begin. It certainly confirms the many local stories here of a lunar surface movie SET housed in a large commercial warehouse on the southern edge of Houston during the late sixties and early seventies. A number of civilians got a look at this studio, simply because their jobs took them into the building. I’ve actually met two of them. Of course, I had no idea if they were telling the truth, but their stories (along with others) pretty much agreed on all key points.
An older man I met recently told me he worked for the phone company in 1974 (five years after Apollo 11) and he and a coworker were in that warehouse one day to do something with the phone lines. He describes seeing a full movie set with a sand-filled lunar surface and painted background, a lunar lander, and the little “moon buggy” that appeared in later Apollo missions. He was very young, and had a good time actually touching real equipment he’d only seen on TV. A security guard came along and told him to leave. The guard said the set was used to make training films, the same story others were told. It’s an obvious cover, but what sort of job training would require you to watch faked moonwalk films? What exactly would you be learning to do?
I’ve asked this man twice if he would guide me to the actual building so I could take a picture of it. Unfortunately, he says too many years have gone by – he’d never be able to find it now. It was in a commercial area south of the 610 loop, and has almost certainly become something else by now.
Armstrong clearly identifies the origin of the Apollo 11 films as THE SET, a word that he repeats again later. He also identifies it several times as the UNIT. And once again he specifically tells us the moonwalk films are a hoax. “IT’S FAKE,” he says, and that’s the third time he’s used that word.
He also answers my first question, which concerned who the people in the films actually were. I thought they were probably actors, but it seems NASA kept it all in-house. Armstrong tells us THAT’S BUZZ, and uses WE and US when describing their experiences at the film unit. So we now know that at some point in their mission preparation, Armstrong and Aldrin had to drive to the movie set (certainly more than once) and be filmed impersonating themselves on the moon.
Armstrong also supplies us with a description of what they did on the set, in a way that is quite characteristic of information coming from the unconscious mind, which finds images to be more efficient than words. The astronauts were suspended from a line, probably on the end of a long boom, the same way a worm on a hook is suspended on the end of a fishing line. Notice how nicely the two words, FISHED US, supply an image that contains all the key information. The reference to spinning seems obscure, since there is nothing about the set itself that spins (as far as we know). I assume that some part of this "fishing"apparatus allowed the suspended men to spin around as needed, without tangling the cable. This would be very interesting to an engineer, and that was Armstrong’s initial training.
One thing that
really stands out is Armstrong’s anger about the amount of lying that NASA was
doing, and the fact that he was forced to go along with it. I wish I understood
his choice of words when he describes the two astronauts playing the role of
“pigs” to support the hoax, but I don’t. Apparently I haven’t been around
enough farms! Whatever it is, it’s clearly not very nice and he is furious and
disgusted with the whole thing.
No wonder the poor guy has virtually refused to talk about his personal role in the mission during all the years that have followed. If Neil Armstrong should ever read this, I’d like him to know that I have great sympathy for the pain he has experienced from being caught up in a moral and ethical dilemma over which he had no real control.
If we can learn anything at all about the filming unit that produced the faked imagery, then anyone trying to find the truth about America’s space program will have a significant advantage right out of the blocks. This does not mean it will be easy. NASA is actually a consortium made up of the U.S. military and a number of corporations involved in the aerospace industry. You might say it is the epitome of Eisenhower’s “military industrial complex.” Most of NASA’s work is thus performed by “private contractors” and this creates a distinct advantage when it comes to shielding NASA operations from the public.
This advantage was highlighted when a robotic mission to Mars was tasked with obtaining new photos of the famous Face On Mars. A number of passes were made but no new photo was released until the angle and direction of sunlight wiped out all the details. An angry public found they had no leverage with which to compel a decent result. Everything was in the hands of a private contractor who, by his contract, had total control. If NEFF ran the operation that produced these films, then it is almost certain that he was a private contractor also, and probably retained ownership of most of the unit’s production and virtually all of its records.
For investigative purposes the two references to NEFF that I had found in Armstrong’s reversed speech are not worth much. A single syllable has a high chance of being a random sound or artifact. I would have to scour the entire press conference in hopes of finding the name again, and it would have to appear as part of an informative phrase or sentence to be worth anything.
After many days of searching I finally found him, and much to my delight the information came from a different person, the strongest proof of RS validity there is. It’s near the end of the press conference, when reporters were allowed to ask questions.
As he attempts to answer a question about the ultimate meaning of their accomplishments, you’ll notice that just like Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin is also attempting to disassociate himself from any personal involvement in what the audience has just seen. He refers to the Apollo program as “demonstrating a potential” for putting men on the Moon, and that’s where we find the reference to NEFF.
When you think about it, faked lunar surface films are all about “potential.” In other words they show what a lunar landing might potentially look like, if and when it ever takes place. For some reason, NASA has had to substitute Neff’s films of a potential reality for films of the real thing. This creates a huge potential for future problems. What if films from future Apollo missions don’t look the same as the films from this one?
Aldrin is a pretty sharp guy, and I believe it is this possibility of effects on future missions he is thinking of when he tells us, NEFF STUCK WITH IT. Remember, there is some anecdotal evidence that Neff’s lunar landing film studio remained in operation for at least the next five years.
If that’s the case, then we might assume that all Apollo crews spent some time at the warehouse being filmed before their departure, perhaps as insurance against whatever went wrong with Apollo 11. On a darker note, it seems to me that there is very little difference between the odd look and feel of imagery from later lunar landing missions and this first one. Could they ALL be faked?
Naturally, I tried to find any record of a man named NEFF connected to the Apollo program. In doing so I ran across an incredible coincidence. There are some clues that suggests this man’s first name was James, or at least started with a J. I assume his field was photography. I found a reference in a NASA data base, but whether or not it’s the same guy is anyone’s guess. I did, however, discover an amazing coincidence.
While I was looking for a 1969 Apollo 11 film producer named Neff, I discovered that the most prominent supplier of Apollo 11 films and photographs today is also named NEFF. He’s Gary Neff and he supplies Apollo Program videos and photos carrying a Gary Neff copyright. How much do you believe in coincidence? Could we be looking at father and son here, or some other family relationship? It turns out that there are a lot of Neffs involved with NASA and other leading edge scientific endeavors. I’ll have to leave the task of finding the right one to someone with better research skills than I. I’ve been told that if you look at the credits attached to older films showing these missions, films you might see on the History Channel for instance, you’ll also see a Neff copyright notice and it’s not Gary.
There's no doubt; The Apollo 11 films were faked, and the whole world was fooled. We were thrilled to be fooled! We loved every minute of it. And, of course, we never imagined that our government, and NASA, and those brave and handsome Astronauts would lie to us about something so monumental in human history.
But they did. And if you think about it, for any reader under 40 this means that Uncle Sam has literally been lying to you for your entire life!
But we can only take this revelation so far. This report leaves many unanswered questions, and the most important question is, “Why?”
What happened in the Apollo 11 mission that forced NASA to employ faked moon landing films instead of the real thing?
Perhaps like this report, the answer will come from an unexpected source and surprise us all…
Ken Welch
Houston
http://www.ken-welch.com/Reports2/Moon1.html
August 14,
2009
It’s been forty years since NASA’s Apollo program electrified the world by putting astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the Moon on July 21st, 1969, and then returning them with fellow Apollo 11 crewman Michael Collins safely to earth. This fabulous accomplishment is one of the foundations of the American psyche; it is part of what defines us. It’s part of what makes us proud of our country and, by extension, proud of ourselves.
Although we were all thrilled by the television coverage of the Apollo 11 mission, and particularly the astonishingly bad video sent back from the lunar surface, it wasn’t long before questions were raised about the authenticity of those scenes that had initially held us so completely spellbound. Personally, I simply ignored the nay-sayers whenever I ran across them. Nobody likes to have a cherished belief seriously challenged. And for many people this resistance also covers their belief in NASA and the space program, the government itself, people they voted for, and so on. We’re talking about sacred territory.
The arrival of the Internet, an “earth change” that has terrified the world’s ruling class since the first private website went on line, began my personal experience of re-education regarding the Apollo program. If you dig around for the good stuff, you’ll find serious material such as this commentary on the use of wires to partially suspend the astronauts and give them the appearance of low gravity. But I still didn’t want to believe the moonwalk video was faked.
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| Add caption |
It was the wonderful humor in that video that finally persuaded me that I should try to pin down, at least for my own peace of mind, whether or not the original Apollo 11 moonwalk video was real or fake. And I had to admit, of all the people over the years who had questioned the official story, none had better tools than I to discover the truth.
I. Going To The Source
For the most part, Reversed Speech picks up unconscious comments made by a speaker about the topic he’s discussing, or about something else that is claiming part of his or her attention, either at a conscious or unconscious level of mind. Because they come through a speech center in the opposite brain hemisphere they are, literally, backwards. You must slow down a person’s speech, and reverse it, to hear these unconscious comments. A link at the top of this page can provide you with more information and examples.The value of Reversed Speech is that it is self-verifying. The existence of the discovered words and phrases can be verified by anyone with a reasonably good sound editor (including some try-before-you-buy shareware programs). Only the human mind can weave backward phrases into forward speech so that you can’t detect them normally. Coupled with the fact that the subconscious cannot lie, clear speech reversals can establish what really happened in virtually any situation – and leave absolutely no room for doubt.
If I wanted to know the truth about the Apollo 11 moonwalk videos there would be no better source than the crew of Apollo 11 themselves. They returned to earth on July 24th, but were placed in quarantine immediately. Today I wonder if the three weeks of isolation was used to make sure everyone was on the same page, but we’ll probably never know. What we do have is audio and video of the Houston press conference held when they emerged from quarantine on August 12th. For my investigation I used the video of the full press conference, including reporters’ questions, found here.
Many people have remarked that the astronauts, especially Armstrong, seemed to be behaving oddly at this first public event. In fact, if you are watching for it, you will see that they are enthusiastic when discussing the voyage to the Moon, and the return trip, but oddly subdued when talking about operations on or near the Moon. There appears to be tension, anger, disappointment or depression, and other feelings that are very much at odds with what should have been a triumphant celebration and homecoming.
My purpose was to learn about the authenticity of the videos, films and photos that were taken on the lunar surface. Because of the nature of reversed speech, I simply watched the press conference proceed while waiting for any specific mention of films or videos. If there was anything special or unusual about them, informative speech reversals would likely occur at the point where the films were specifically mentioned.
A good opportunity appeared quickly. After a rambling introduction in which Neil Armstrong appears to be trying to disassociate himself and his crew from what the audience is about to see, he says that the press conference will not follow the normal pattern. Instead, it will be a film and slide show with the astronauts providing a narrative.
I zeroed in on this direct reference to FILMS and found an amazing set of speech reversals. They clearly indicate that something was very wrong.
There’s not much doubt here about what it is that Armstrong believes is faked. In fact it would be good enough for me. However, on the off chance that a speaker might be thinking of something else, I routinely look for a second occurrence when a particular reversal is likely to take on great import. Often we’ve found confirmation from a second person. In this case, though, it is Armstrong taking the lead in the narration, and so the next direct reference to a FILM is also his.
This occurs near the end of the moonwalk segment, when Armstrong says, "This FILM shows our final look at Tranquility Base before our departure." Listen to what was audible when I slowed and reversed that sentence:
FAKES IT and FAKE FILM pretty much lock down the answer to all those questions about the authenticity of the Apollo 11 moonwalk imagery. To understand the value of multiple references, note the BUZZ SCARED reversal. Without another instance, we can't be sure if Armstrong is recalling that Buzz was scared during the lift-off from the lunar surface, or if he is scared “now” that someone may see something in the films that would prove they are fakes. Another reference would likely pin this down.
Happily enough, I had satisfied my own curiosity about the moonwalk imagery, and with surprisingly little effort. My real challenge was to decide what I should do with the information now that I had found it.
II. Moonwalk Films Faked, But What Does It Mean?
I had simply wanted to know if the films of Armstrong and Aldrin hopping around on the lunar surface were real or faked. The movements of the astronauts had never looked right to me. In supposed one-sixth gravity, nothing rose high enough, easily enough; and everything that came down seemed to fall too quickly and land too hard. I felt a sense of satisfaction that my impression of wrongness had finally been validated.But how would other people feel? We are talking about something that is virtually a national icon. Worse yet, I wasn’t really sure whether I’d uncovered actual fraud or simply a panic-driven answer to some simple problem, like a failure of the video systems aboard the Lunar Module. There was at least one transmission from Apollo 11 from a point between the Earth and the Moon that seemed to focus on problems with a video camera.
Eventually I decided not to publish what I’d found. I’m as fond of the Apollo 11 story as the next guy, and I was sure there was some reasonable explanation. There were many indications that the astronauts were not happy with the way it all turned out, but if Neil Armstrong could keep the secret, so could I.
III. NASA Announces Originals Are Lost
Last month marked the fortieth anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon Landing and, although it was not a really big deal, most people saw some nice coverage from their favorite news source. More interesting than old films, there were several new developments that caught my eye. For one thing Neil Armstrong, who has been fiercely reticent about discussing his role as the First Man On The Moon, turned down the opportunity to speak about the mission that was the culmination of his career. NASA released fairly recent photographs from an orbiting survey craft supposedly depicting all the Apollo landing sites with just enough detail to see the pathways that astronauts created as they moved about the sites – in case anyone doubted that the astronauts were really there. The one that punched my personal hot-button claimed the tapes had been in the National Archives. Now I don’t know about you, but I’m thoroughly sick of the way really important evidence just disappears in this country, especially material held in the supposedly sacrosanct National Archives. All the forensic evidence from the 1963 coup that put Lyndon Johnson in the oval office disappeared from the Archives. And it hasn’t been that long since Sandy Berger, Clinton’s National Security Advisor, was caught removing documents from the Archives, presumably to destroy them.
From Waco to Oklahoma City and the highly unlikely drama of 9-11, crucial evidence relating to our nation’s history has disappeared just as fast as Uncle Sam can make it go away. It is such an arrogant and insulting abuse of power that I think I would gladly cheer for anyone planning to bring down the central government if they would just promise to open all the files and make them public!
So it didn’t take a lot of time for me to decide that I should revisit the Apollo 11 mission, dig out whatever additional information I might find there, and publish it for the people who are interested in truth. After all, I’ve got the best investigative tools on the planet, and thanks to our donors a good platform for sharing what I find. Might as well use it!
IV. Returning To The Scene Of The Crime
My intention was to return to that 1969 press conference and find at least one more good reference to faked films to make the evidence overwhelming. I still think the imagery is the key to unlocking the story. If the evidence that the films and images are faked can reach an overwhelming level, then all those people out there who are working on NASA related issues will have a solid foundation for their own investigations and not have to revisit the imagery issue over and over again.First, let’s review what we know. There are three types of original imagery related to Apollo 11: video transmitted from the lunar surface, 16mm movie film shot by the astronauts and returned to earth in the command module, and some surprisingly professional-looking still photos shot by the astronauts using their Hasselblad still cameras.
Armstrong told us that the films the audience was viewing in Houston in 1969 were faked. I was investigating the video images beamed back from the moon, but now I’m wondering if these were even shown at the press conference. They were horrible in terms of quality, and certainly nothing to be proud of. And there were credibility issues. Supposedly, the Lunar Lander had an antenna that was too small to transmit decent video, yet the images it transmitted of the descent phase were perfectly acceptable.
Reviewing the press conference once again, I think it’s unlikely that those original videos from Tranquility Base were even shown. If they were, then they would have begun with the One-Small-Step video and there would have been a standing ovation that would have lasted for some time. There was nothing like that at all.
That means the images of astronauts on the lunar surface while Armstrong was speaking that day were almost certainly from the 16mm motion picture film that has been the primary visual documentation for the Apollo 11 mission for forty years. So I want to pin down who actually appears in those films, where they were made and, if I’m lucky, who made them.
V. The Awful Truth Emerges
In the Life Magazine photo above you can see the arrangement on the stage at the Manned Spacecraft Center as the Apollo 11 astronauts describe their journey for the press. I decided to locate the point at which the films transitioned to scenes taken from the lunar surface, and simply wring out every speech reversal I could find from whoever was speaking. This turned out to be Neil Armstrong again.Armstrong can see the screen to his left. As the film shifts to scenes taken on the ground he is still reading a very elaborate explanation of why he and Aldrin delayed an extra hour before climbing down from the lander. There must be a reason why NASA thought this needed extra emphasis. For instance, if they’d just discovered they couldn’t transmit live TV, then time would be needed to hook up with pre-recorded imagery.
Whatever the reason for it, Armstrong doggedly tries to complete the explanation while at the same time he is becoming increasingly distracted by the film being projected to his left. You can hear him stumbling through his lines in the audio clip below.
This period of distraction produced one of the richest sets of speech reversals I’ve ever run across. And the contents are pretty amazing!
This material is so rich that I hardly know where to begin. It certainly confirms the many local stories here of a lunar surface movie SET housed in a large commercial warehouse on the southern edge of Houston during the late sixties and early seventies. A number of civilians got a look at this studio, simply because their jobs took them into the building. I’ve actually met two of them. Of course, I had no idea if they were telling the truth, but their stories (along with others) pretty much agreed on all key points.
An older man I met recently told me he worked for the phone company in 1974 (five years after Apollo 11) and he and a coworker were in that warehouse one day to do something with the phone lines. He describes seeing a full movie set with a sand-filled lunar surface and painted background, a lunar lander, and the little “moon buggy” that appeared in later Apollo missions. He was very young, and had a good time actually touching real equipment he’d only seen on TV. A security guard came along and told him to leave. The guard said the set was used to make training films, the same story others were told. It’s an obvious cover, but what sort of job training would require you to watch faked moonwalk films? What exactly would you be learning to do?
I’ve asked this man twice if he would guide me to the actual building so I could take a picture of it. Unfortunately, he says too many years have gone by – he’d never be able to find it now. It was in a commercial area south of the 610 loop, and has almost certainly become something else by now.
Armstrong clearly identifies the origin of the Apollo 11 films as THE SET, a word that he repeats again later. He also identifies it several times as the UNIT. And once again he specifically tells us the moonwalk films are a hoax. “IT’S FAKE,” he says, and that’s the third time he’s used that word.
He also answers my first question, which concerned who the people in the films actually were. I thought they were probably actors, but it seems NASA kept it all in-house. Armstrong tells us THAT’S BUZZ, and uses WE and US when describing their experiences at the film unit. So we now know that at some point in their mission preparation, Armstrong and Aldrin had to drive to the movie set (certainly more than once) and be filmed impersonating themselves on the moon.
Armstrong also supplies us with a description of what they did on the set, in a way that is quite characteristic of information coming from the unconscious mind, which finds images to be more efficient than words. The astronauts were suspended from a line, probably on the end of a long boom, the same way a worm on a hook is suspended on the end of a fishing line. Notice how nicely the two words, FISHED US, supply an image that contains all the key information. The reference to spinning seems obscure, since there is nothing about the set itself that spins (as far as we know). I assume that some part of this "fishing"apparatus allowed the suspended men to spin around as needed, without tangling the cable. This would be very interesting to an engineer, and that was Armstrong’s initial training.
No wonder the poor guy has virtually refused to talk about his personal role in the mission during all the years that have followed. If Neil Armstrong should ever read this, I’d like him to know that I have great sympathy for the pain he has experienced from being caught up in a moral and ethical dilemma over which he had no real control.
VI. Did NEFF Produce The Faked Lunar Landing Films?
In the last segment, the name NEFF appeared twice as Neil Armstrong unconsciously relived his experience with faking the lunar surface images that would define the Apollo 11 mission. The sound quality wasn’t good, but two occurrences definitely calls for further investigation.If we can learn anything at all about the filming unit that produced the faked imagery, then anyone trying to find the truth about America’s space program will have a significant advantage right out of the blocks. This does not mean it will be easy. NASA is actually a consortium made up of the U.S. military and a number of corporations involved in the aerospace industry. You might say it is the epitome of Eisenhower’s “military industrial complex.” Most of NASA’s work is thus performed by “private contractors” and this creates a distinct advantage when it comes to shielding NASA operations from the public.
This advantage was highlighted when a robotic mission to Mars was tasked with obtaining new photos of the famous Face On Mars. A number of passes were made but no new photo was released until the angle and direction of sunlight wiped out all the details. An angry public found they had no leverage with which to compel a decent result. Everything was in the hands of a private contractor who, by his contract, had total control. If NEFF ran the operation that produced these films, then it is almost certain that he was a private contractor also, and probably retained ownership of most of the unit’s production and virtually all of its records.
For investigative purposes the two references to NEFF that I had found in Armstrong’s reversed speech are not worth much. A single syllable has a high chance of being a random sound or artifact. I would have to scour the entire press conference in hopes of finding the name again, and it would have to appear as part of an informative phrase or sentence to be worth anything.
After many days of searching I finally found him, and much to my delight the information came from a different person, the strongest proof of RS validity there is. It’s near the end of the press conference, when reporters were allowed to ask questions.
As he attempts to answer a question about the ultimate meaning of their accomplishments, you’ll notice that just like Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin is also attempting to disassociate himself from any personal involvement in what the audience has just seen. He refers to the Apollo program as “demonstrating a potential” for putting men on the Moon, and that’s where we find the reference to NEFF.
When you think about it, faked lunar surface films are all about “potential.” In other words they show what a lunar landing might potentially look like, if and when it ever takes place. For some reason, NASA has had to substitute Neff’s films of a potential reality for films of the real thing. This creates a huge potential for future problems. What if films from future Apollo missions don’t look the same as the films from this one?
Aldrin is a pretty sharp guy, and I believe it is this possibility of effects on future missions he is thinking of when he tells us, NEFF STUCK WITH IT. Remember, there is some anecdotal evidence that Neff’s lunar landing film studio remained in operation for at least the next five years.
If that’s the case, then we might assume that all Apollo crews spent some time at the warehouse being filmed before their departure, perhaps as insurance against whatever went wrong with Apollo 11. On a darker note, it seems to me that there is very little difference between the odd look and feel of imagery from later lunar landing missions and this first one. Could they ALL be faked?
Naturally, I tried to find any record of a man named NEFF connected to the Apollo program. In doing so I ran across an incredible coincidence. There are some clues that suggests this man’s first name was James, or at least started with a J. I assume his field was photography. I found a reference in a NASA data base, but whether or not it’s the same guy is anyone’s guess. I did, however, discover an amazing coincidence.
While I was looking for a 1969 Apollo 11 film producer named Neff, I discovered that the most prominent supplier of Apollo 11 films and photographs today is also named NEFF. He’s Gary Neff and he supplies Apollo Program videos and photos carrying a Gary Neff copyright. How much do you believe in coincidence? Could we be looking at father and son here, or some other family relationship? It turns out that there are a lot of Neffs involved with NASA and other leading edge scientific endeavors. I’ll have to leave the task of finding the right one to someone with better research skills than I. I’ve been told that if you look at the credits attached to older films showing these missions, films you might see on the History Channel for instance, you’ll also see a Neff copyright notice and it’s not Gary.
VII. Conclusion
It’s easy to verify the speech reversals featured in this report. In fact, if you drop me a note I’ll even supply you with a high-res MP3 of the audio with reversals already marked in Sony notation (for Sound Forge or other Sony products).There's no doubt; The Apollo 11 films were faked, and the whole world was fooled. We were thrilled to be fooled! We loved every minute of it. And, of course, we never imagined that our government, and NASA, and those brave and handsome Astronauts would lie to us about something so monumental in human history.
But they did. And if you think about it, for any reader under 40 this means that Uncle Sam has literally been lying to you for your entire life!
But we can only take this revelation so far. This report leaves many unanswered questions, and the most important question is, “Why?”
What happened in the Apollo 11 mission that forced NASA to employ faked moon landing films instead of the real thing?
Perhaps like this report, the answer will come from an unexpected source and surprise us all…
Ken Welch
Houston
