Scientific literacy

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

That reporting by Douglas Caddy, that JFK was killed over the ET issue, makes a lot of sense, and I believe that it was likely related to JFK’s attempt to end the Space Race soon before he was murdered. That Marilyn Monroe document may be legitimate (a big maybe), or at least partially so. That appearance of General Schulgen’s name on the memo is strange, and I have not seen it satisfactorily explained.

After JFK was murdered, the Space Race was back on with a vengeance, the Vietnam invasion escalated, JFK’s Alliance for Progress was gutted, and so on. My father and Brian O both had to get top secret security clearances to work at NASA. I don’t know how far that extended at NASA, but at least the Mission Control crew and the astronauts had to have them. But I think it was related to Cold War zeal, not any fakery. One relationship that I have yet to mention is that Henry Luce’s publishing empire led the public attack on JFK while he was still alive, and Luce worked for CIA front organizations with his good buddy Allen Dulles, whom he even may have shared a mistress with, as well as Luce’s wife. Read Battling Wall Street for some details on the attacks on JFK by Luce’s empire. Luce’s empire “coincidentally” bought the Zapruder film. On Brian’s first day on the job as an astronaut, he was coerced into signing away exclusive rights to all of his public writings of his astronaut activities to Luce’s empire. For those concerned about a UFO connection with JFK’s death, and any faked Moon landings, that is just one more situation that makes you go, “Hmmm.”

However, the JFK cover-up would have been immensely easier than faking the Moon landings. The faked backyard photos, planting the magic bullet, the altered autopsy evidence, including photos and X-rays, erasing Oswald’s spook career, killing some witnesses, and the like, would have been child’s play compared to faking the Moon landings.

I am now going to write about Brian’s connection to the faked Moon landings issue, in a way that I have not publicly done before. Soon before Brian died, he lamented the fact that his stance on the Moon landings had eclipsed everything else about him. Brian’s stance on the Moon landings had plenty to do with the UFO issue, although Brian never publicly spoke out about it, due to fear of retribution by the USA’s military, and I want to back way up about this, back to Brian’s astronaut days and even earlier.

Brian was raised as a typical Irish-Catholic in Boston, who had a precocious interest in space ever since kindergarten, and his visit to Harvard’s observatory when he was eight, to see the planets through its telescope, on the night that Truman beat Dewey (the Dulles’s horse in the race, and Richard Nixon would later be a Dulles creature), was a seminal event in Brian’s life. Brian’s astronomer’s path was set by then, and when he wrote in high school of space satellites, the year before Sputnik was launched, Brian’s teacher and fellow students were befuddled by Brian’s choice of topic. The father of modern rocketry, Charles Goddard, was hounded, the object of ridicule and scorn, and his contributions were not recognized until the Space Race. The Wright brothers were received in even crazier fashion, denied and ridiculed for years after they first flew. So, such airy and spacy notions were far from in vogue in those early days.

Brian’s first degree was marked by mundane grades, as Brian explored life beyond his repressed Irish-Catholic roots, but a priest at Georgetown got him into the graduate program. Brian later performed an experiment that proved that priest’s views of Mars incorrect. That challenge of authority was an early warning sign of where Brian was headed, and Brian got kicked out of Georgetown for writing a satirical play on the faculty, which a fellow student working for the CIA leaked to the faculty. Even though he was expelled from the program, Brian had a master’s diploma in hand and got into Berkeley’s doctoral program in astronomy (Berkeley in the mid-1960s, imagine that scene. ), which was where his path to NASA was set. Brian had a mentor, and together they began publishing papers on Mars, which ran in Science and Nature, the most prestigious venues for publishing scientific papers.

Brian’s doctoral dissertation was on Mars, and little did Brian know it, but that most famous NASA Nazi, Werner von Braun, was in position to try making his Mars dreams a reality. Dr. von Braun was the primary reason why Brian was selected as an astronaut, as the first talent in the stable for the Mars mission. Between the day that NASA hired Brian and his start date a few weeks later, NASA lost the budget battle on Capitol Hill with the Pentagon, as the invasion of Vietnam had to be paid for. On Brian’s first day of work, Deke Slayton told him and his fellow astronauts that they were no longer needed, and Brian’s group of astronauts called themselves the XS-11. Brian was one of several in that group who quit, mainly because it looked like their chances of going into space were limited, and Brian’s Mars mission was soon scrubbed from the drawing board. None of his group ever left Earth orbit, as those ambitious plans when he was hired were all scrubbed.

But Brian did not fit in on his first day. Slayton later called hiring Brian his biggest hiring mistake. Nearly all astronauts to that time came from military backgrounds, virtually all of them test pilots, and Brian was the odd man out. On his first day on the job, at the astronauts’ briefing, led by Alan Shepard, which was organized like pre-flight pilot briefings before flying military missions, Brian noticed that he was the only man in the room wearing glasses, which he promptly removed and put in his pocket. Brian was the odd man out in numerous ways. Instead of the military mission mentality and the nerdishness of scientists, Brian had the heart of a poet and became a man of the people. After his NASA days, he taught Physics for Poets at Princeton, before he had his mystical awakening. Brian did not fit into NASA’s culture, and it showed. After nearly crashing his plane on his second solo flight, Brian quit the astronaut corps.

Carl Sagan recruited Brian to teach at Cornell after Brian quit NASA, and when Brian published his book on his astronaut days in 1970, he was involved in high-profile protest activity over the invasion of Southeast Asia, which began a period of high-profile political activity on Capitol Hill, and he became a NASA gadfly, writing op-eds in The New York Times and elsewhere that challenged NASA, earning its ire. It was certainly partly why Brian did not have a biography at NASA until I wrote one and had my adventures in publishing it, but I get ahead of myself.

Brian and Sagan were arguably the world’s two leading experts on Mars in those days, and Brian was a key member of the science team for the Mariner 10 mission, which investigated Venus and Mercury. Brian became quite the academic vagabond, teaching at Cal Tech, Princeton, Berkeley, and elsewhere. Brian’s politically active years, especially advising presidential candidate Mo Udall, ended Brian’s first marriage, and he continued his advocacy of space colonies and asteroid mining at Princeton, until that fateful day when he had his mystical awakening, performing the same exercise that I did five years earlier, which gave me my mystical awakening. After his mystical awakening, Brian never quite returned to the Establishment’s fold.

The awakened Brian quit his sherry-sipping soft berth at Princeton and got a job at SAIC, a leading space contractor in those days, where he continued his space colony and asteroid-mining work, but he refused to work on Reagan’s Star Wars, which led to him losing his job there and them giving his office to an Air Force general who was showered with millions of dollars to devise strategies for the American military to prevail in the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust. It was the last job in the Establishment that Brian ever had, and when he was there, he got Buzz Aldrin a job and shared an office with him, and that is where my narrative will pick up the faked Moon landing story and Brian’s involvement. Buzz’s first launch at NASA was my father’s last.

If you shared an office with Buzz Aldrin and were a fellow former astronaut, would you have asked him about his time on the Moon? Brian surely did, and I don’t know what others he asked before then, but Buzz’s reaction, and later Ed Mitchell’s, most certainly, got Brian to wondering about the Moon landings. Buzz was reduced to selling cars for a time and spent time in institutions. Ed Mitchell needed therapy to come to grips with his lunar experiences and he generally refused to talk about his lunar experiences. I don’t know what other Moon-walking astronauts Brian might have talked to, but those were certainly two of them, and their undoubtedly odd replies gave Brian pause, and he began wondering about the Moon landings. But Brian would soon have his own experiences that got him wondering about the Moon landings and other space issues, but that is for the coming posts.

Best,

Wade

Edited June 6, 2016 by Wade Frazier

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

Brian lost his job at SAIC in 1987 (near where I was raised), just as I became Dennis’s partner (where Brian was raised), and our big adventures began. Less than two years later, my life was ruined and I was radicalized. Brian began exploring the fringes of science in earnest then, but even before he began that journey, Richard Hoagland and others got Brian interested in the Face at Cydonia. Brian

until his life’s end, but he never wrote about it after the 1998 image came back. I called him in 1998 as he was downloading the image like the rest of us, before high-speed internet connections existed for public use.

Brian did not shrink from controversial issues, and when we met in July 1991, Brian was just getting his feet wet in the free energy milieu, and we joked about the aliens and artifacts at Wright Patterson Air Force Base as we drove past its front gates. Brian’s speech at the conference that I ferried him to was on the need for a new science. The next year is when Brian began to get radicalized. He hosted a UFO conference and was soon approached by high-ranking military officials who “asked” him to perform classified UFO research for the military. Brian knew the officials from his Capitol Hill days. Immediately after rejecting their “offer,” Brian nearly died of a heart attack, which ruined his health and shortened his life. When I met with Brian in 2001 and we traded notes, he discussed his brush with death in detail, but he never publicly discussed it, afraid that the military would then “finish the job.” The closest that he ever came to admitting it publicly was in the prologue to his last book, titled, “Confessions of a naïve scientific heretic: A story about the carrot and the stick.” You can also see him in video clips in his life’s last years when he would briefly allude to trouble with the spooks. He had more than one encounter, but we only discussed his first one.

In our note-trading session, I told him about my friend’s exotic technology show, but Brian was more interested in my CIA contract agent relative. Stories such as Mark’s were just part of the scenery in that milieu, and it was very evident that the official positions on such matters were fraudulent, and the “skeptics” were often part of the cover-up, with Brian’s former colleague Carl Sagan often leading the debunking festivities. By that time, I considered organized skepticism to be a criminal enterprise and had my own “skeptical” stalker, and Brian told me that he had his own stalker who would appear at Brian’s public appearances and harry him.

Because of his brush with death and other experiences, Brian had no doubt that the American government’s stance on UFOs, of silence and debunkery, was bogus. Because of his adventures and talking with Moon-walking astronauts such as Buzz and Ed, Brian entertained the idea of fake Moon landings. Brian suffered through many situations in which entertaining unorthodox ideas got twisted by their proponents and opponents into Brian’s unequivocal certainty about the issue, when nothing could be further from the truth. Science is never about certainty. For instance, Brian never asserted that the Face on Mars was artificial, but that it could be, and warranted further investigation, but I have to do battle with people who tried putting words in his mouth. Brian readily admitted how people such as Hoagland played a little loose with the data in making his case for a “city” at Cydonia. Brian believed in the process of science, and advocated scientific investigation of phenomena on the fringes that did not fit into the materialistic, reductionistic paradigm that mainstream science currently operates under. Materialism is a religion, not a scientific finding, and when Brian had experiences that showed had how false that religion was, he was essentially ruined as a mainstream scientist. During his adventures, it became all-too-evident that black science and black projects were very real and subjected to history’s biggest cover-up, and it is directly related to the UFO/ET issue. The exotic technology and ET cover-ups are conjoined, and Brian’s brush with death helped lead to his prominent involvement in Greer’s efforts.

Brian’s stance was a difficult one to maintain, with “skeptics” assailing him, the scientifically illiterate New Age/Conspiracist crowd turning him into an icon and political football, and putting his life at risk from the spooks. Not many can walk that razor’s edge, and all-in-all, Brian did quite well.

More posts are coming regarding my adventures in the Moon landings, Brian’s views, dealing with NASA and getting Brian’s biography published, dealing with assaults from the “skeptics,” dealing with Wikipedia and so-called “allies” in the field, etc. Getting at the truth, especially in these matters, can be like walking the razor’s edge.

The scientific/scholarly process can work, but in these realms, applying them can be like walking a minefield and hall of mirrors, with mountains of disinformation and chaff, naïve and dishonest “skeptics,” naïve and paranoid New Age/Conspiracists, naïve and blinkered scientists, and many other hurdles to navigate. Scientific literacy is vital for sailing in waters like those, otherwise, people easily disappear down the rabbit holes, and zillions beckon, as siren songs hail from all directions.

Best,

Wade Edited June 6, 2016 by Wade Frazier

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

I am looking at my list of topics, and I don’t see an easy way to string them together logically, so here goes. There is nothing like being there, and one reason for all of the Internet chattering and nattering is that those people don’t have any experience, or were close to anybody who did, so they chatter/natter, which is pretty pointless, IMO, like gossip. As I have written plenty, if not for my adventures, I would likely not have much worth saying. Experience is the greatest, and arguably only, teacher. But with language, writing, the Internet, and so on, those who learned by doing or being there are able to relate their experiences, which can shorten the learning curve for those who came behind them. That is the sole purpose of my work. If everybody had to learn how Dennis, Brian, and I did, almost nobody would survive the experience to graduate from the curriculum.

While experience is the greatest teacher (which is why a mystical awakening can only come through experience, for instance), the experiences can also be traumatic, which can send people off the deep end or off into other unproductive directions. It can wake you up, but you can also misinterpret what you experience, and I will give some examples.

I believe that people who had experiences that caused them to question the authenticity of the Moon landings probably ran into something different: the UFO/ET cover-up, which is very real, and is conjoined with the free energy cover-up, which is all too real. What Steven Greer did with his Disclosure Project, which culminated in secret Congressional hearings (and then his team was taken out and Greer was never the same), with Ed Mitchell at his side, was highly impressive, and when I began watching his witnesses talk about their experiences, some described the same technologies that my friend was shown several years previously, which gained Greer’s effort plenty of cred with me. Greer had long linked JFK to the heart of the ET issue, and Douglas Caddy’s reporting fit that scenario like a glove.

Brian discovered the hard way that the American government’s silence and debunking stance on the UFO/ET issue was fraudulent, and who knows exactly what there was about Buzz’s reaction to being asked how it went on the Moon that gave Brian pause, but Greer has long been adamant that the Apollo 11 crew encountered ETs. I have a tight circle around me on the ET/UFO issue, and do not relate third- and fourth-hand rumors, but only relate experiences from people close to me or what I encountered (if I am not citing something that has been published by what I consider credible sources). I heard from a close source about astronaut close encounters with ET craft at the International Space Station. Astronauts are not trained for ET encounters, but when they have them, they are sworn to silence (with threats that are more than implied), but not all of them can take that information to their graves, and some can leak out to a select few, and I have been a beneficiary of some of that. For instance, apparently, some close to Buzz know about his ET encounter, but they leave it up to Buzz to disclose it or not, and it looks like Buzz will be a good soldier and take it to his grave with him.

Greer has repeatedly stated that Armstrong and Aldrin had an ET encounter and were sworn/threatened to silence, and Armstrong took it to his grave. That does not surprise me at all, and could have been related to Buzz’s reaction to Brian’s question. But I want to relate an incident where the ET cover-up likely related to the Moon landings issue. Bart Sibrel was a TV producer and got ahold of some Apollo 11 footage that he misinterpreted as evidence of faked Moon landings. His presentation had me going for a few days, until I realized that his evidence did not depict what he purported that it did, but he and I had a three-hour conversation back in 2001.

Whether Bart really had anything was beside the point. Bart thought that he had something, and announced to the local TV station that he was going to bring the smoking gun to the TV station for immediate broadcast. It looks like Bart ran afoul of the ET cover-up, not the faked Moon landing cover-up. It was hard to know at the time just what Bart had ahold of, but a funny thing happened on the way to the TV station: Bart’s car was intercepted and he was arrested, his tape of “The Footage” was seized, and he was drugged and thrown into a mental institution in the remote countryside. He said that some “White Hat” person looked after him while he was incarcerated there, and he later escaped the institution, Deliverance-style, and made it back home. Did Bart really have the smoking gun of faked Moon landings or the ET cover-up? No, but he acted like he did, and that set the wheels in motion to prevent something from being aired to the public that TPTB did not want aired. In my opinion, once they viewed Bart’s “smoking gun,” they had a good laugh and were no longer concerned with Bart, and his “escape” did not matter to them, but they could not take the chance that Bart really had something. Nipping it in the bud early is far easier than damage-control later, spinning disinformation, etc.

In Ventura, when Dennis announced that he had the goods for making free energy happen, we were raided two days later, the sheriff’s deputies stole all of our technical material, and Mr. Researcher was never the same. Did they steal anything of great value, as far as free energy went? No, but Dennis made them think that we had it, and if you have something that they think is important to maintaining their global rackets, especially the issue that can overturn the entire applecart, then they will come and get it, and you can’t do anything about it. That is partly why when I see free energy aspirants think that they are going to play cloak-and-dagger games, with proprietary technology tricks, I have to shake my head. That approach is foolish, and can be suicidal.

But after his harsh treatment, Bart will go to his grave believing that he found the smoking gun of faked Moon landings. That reaction is understandable, but IMO, he did not understand why he was arrested and sequestered like he was, until they could have a look at his “smoking gun.”

As an addendum to Bart’s adventures, for the couple of days that I thought that maybe Bart had something, it was kind of scary, and was a lesson for me about finding what you are looking for. If you discover some truth that TPTB want suppressed, to the level of “having the goods,” are you ready to deal with the consequences? That is a question that aspirants really can’t answer until they are faced with it, and my takeaway from the Bart experience was to be careful of what you wish for. If you get it, it may not turn out like you hoped. It is easy to get in way over your head in these milieus. I suppose that I should have learned that from my days with Dennis, but I am a slow learner.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

On to my adventures in being Brian’s biographer and dealing with the Moon landings issue. I have written about it here and there, but this will likely be my definitive rendering of the issue.

Brian and I met in 1991, as our paths finally crossed. We had no further contact, and I wonder if he remembered me (probably not), until he published Miracle in the Void in late 1995, and I became that book’s biggest fan, so Brian later told me. I introduced him to Dennis, at Brian’s request, a few months later, when both spoke at a New Age expo, as Dennis was barnstorming the USA. Dennis thought that Brian had a lot to learn, playing the Paul Revere of FE, and Dennis was right, but Brian learned honestly, through the crucible of experience. I called Brian as he was downloading that 1998 image of the Face on Mars, so we were friendly in those days, if not exactly colleagues. It was not until I informed Brian of Armstrong’s Leap around June 2001 that we began to collaborate. He invited me to California a couple of months later, and I chauffeured him around during our seminal note-trading sessions.

I don’t recall much interaction after that until Brian invited me to help found NEM in May 2003. I was an emotional wreck, in the dark phase of my midlife crisis and was still reeling from the USA’s invasion of Iraq. The Nazis swung at Nuremberg for what Bush and gang did. I never asked Brian, but I would imagine that the oil-and-blood-soaked invasion of Iraq had something to do with his founding NEM when he did. The NEM experience was a disaster for both Brian and me, and we had no contact for years afterward, as I struggled with my midlife crisis and Brian lived in exile in South America, after he was kicked out of NEM.

This essay, published in the summer of 2007, as I recall, is what began bringing Brian back into my life, as Brian said that it was the best writing that he had seen in a long time on the issue. Brian’s influence led to my first public interview in 2008, and the next year, we did the Camelot interview, which I later learned was because Bill had been familiar with my writings since around 2001. A few months later, Brian asked me to help him write that DOE proposal, and I was in Brian’s circles again. It was a mixed bag, and I begged off of some of Brian’s invitations, such as getting together with FE scientists and inventors for some kind of effort. Been there, done that. I will never again get involved in somebody’s else’s effort like that. Most who I encountered in Brian’s circles were naïve, if well-intended. Some were scientists, others were activists and helpers, but it was a motley crew, like NEM proved to be. Some visited me and some I sent Brian’s way, but those experiences helped set the path that I am on today.

I was working long hours at a high-tech company (60-70 hour weeks for most of the year), which I did for ten years, during the entirety of my close collaboration with Brian, so what I did with Brian was all done in my “spare” time. This essay, for instance, is the public version of a letter that I wrote to Brian, and it took me most of a year to finish it. I began it around the time that I helped write that DOE proposal. After Brian died, it took me nearly a year to finally finish my tribute essay about him. Seeing the long time that it took me to write those small essays helped me realize that I needed a career break if I was going to write that big essay.

Soon after helping write that DOE proposal (the “Big Picture” part is all mine, and could be considered a prelude to my big essay), Brian asked me to write his NASA and Wikipedia biographies. I can’t recall the entire sequence of events, but one thing led to another, and writing those biographies was added to my list of things to do. On one hand, they needed to get done and I was honored to help, and I think that Brian sensed that the end was near. I am so happy that we got them done while Brian was still alive, but I was not looking forward to the experience. Brian’s Wikipedia bio at the time was a travesty, dominated by the fake Moon landings issue, and I had already had dismaying experiences with Wikipedia‘s editors. Brian was the only NASA astronaut without an official biography, which was obviously for political reasons, Brian being the NASA gadfly that he was.

I had my own Internet stalker, Brian received regular attacks and hate mail, had his own stalker when he spoke publicly, and I learned my lesson about unfiltered public interaction back in 2007-2008, as the trolls swarmed me wherever I appeared in forums that discussed my work. Other than Mr. Skeptic, who was probably a professional xxxxx, the trolls were all anonymous cowards, which was only a variation of my journey’s primary lesson. Even supposedly protected forums had their problems.

I was expecting Wikipedia’s editors to be an obstacle to getting a good biography of Brian published, and I was unfortunately later proved right, so I decided that it would be strategically best to get his NASA biography done first, and then descend into the fray at Wikipedia. I wrote Brian’s NASA biography in the summer of 2009, with Brian’s input. The original biography is on Brian’s site. As you can see on that page, NASA provided a bureaucratic response for why Brian did not have a NASA biography, but as I discovered later, their provided reason was false, as I got Brian’s biography published without Brian ever having to sign a “NASA Privacy Act Form.” After several months of being stonewalled by NASA, at the same NASA portal from which they issued their false bureaucratic reason within minutes, I had to resort to Plan B. I believe that I submitted his biography to that portal three times, and had Brian do it once, without ever receiving the courtesy of a reply.

Plan B was finding another door to NASA. Just as we were thinking about the next steps, Brian was contacted by a NASA employee who was making a poster of astronauts who were also Eagle Scouts. He was friendly, but could not help us breach the stone wall regarding Brian’s biography. I finally contacted one of Brian’s colleagues from his NASA days, and he directed me straight to the astronaut corps. That was in late April 2010, more than seven months after I first submitted Brian’s biography to NASA.

I wrote to the astronauts that ran the astronaut corps, and a week later, the most famous active astronaut was assigned to get Brian’s biography done, and I wrote about it here. When all was said and done, only Chris Ferguson, Brian, and the astronaut corps came out of my biography process, at NASA and Wikipedia, looking good. Nobody else helped us, and I ended up interacting with several big names in the field, I am sorry to report. There is much more to come.

Best,

Wade

Edited June 9, 2016 by Wade Frazier

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

When I wrote Brian’s NASA bio, I had him write his Martian part, as it was his unique distinction and he knew best how to write it. Through the editing process with Chris Ferguson, I left the Martian part alone and there was no comment about it. The astronaut corps certainly had no problem with Brian’s Martian credentials.

However, after Brian’s NASA bio was published, a leading space debunker informed me that Brian’s bio was inaccurate. I thought that maybe he took issue with Brian’s stated reason for leaving the astronaut corps: the lack of spaceflight opportunity. The Wikipedia page on Brian’s group states that he quit because of the hazards of training, not the lack of a spaceflight opportunity, as some other astronauts in his group stated. Brian gave several reasons for his disenchantment with NASA in his The Making of an Ex-Astronaut, published in 1970, and the dwindling likelihood of ever getting into space was one of them, along with the hazards of training. Lyndon Johnson came to Mission Control in early 1968 and told the troops that the funding cuts because of Vietnam’s invasion meant that NASA’s ambitious plans beyond the Moon landings were being scrapped, including planetary flybys. That was why Brian was hired, so he saw the writing on the wall and quit a few months later, combined with his other dissatisfactions with NASA.

I asked that space debunker (one of the most famous) what about Brian’s bio that he thought was inaccurate, and a couple of weeks later, I got my answer. That debunker enlisted the help of a NASA historian to specifically challenge this sentence of Brian’s biography:


“After completing a Ph.D. thesis on the physical properties of the Martian surface, O'Leary was specifically selected for a potential manned Mars mission when it was still in NASA’s program plan.”


The historian stated that Brian was never assigned to a mission like astronauts were on this list. True enough, but that was not what Brian stated. The Mars flyby mission was on the drawing board back then, as described here, for instance. All that the space debunker and so-called NASA historian had to do was get Brian’s book and see his account of his astronaut interview, to understand Brian’s Martian credentials. That debunking exercise was idiotic. I had already seen how Dennis’s most prominent “skeptical” assailant was a criminal, but to see that leading space debunker engage in such irrational behavior was an eye-opener for me. To be charitable, that space debunker had committed the straw man fallacy, and seemed unconcerned about portraying anything close to the truth.

I was concerned that that leading space debunker was going to start some campaign at NASA to erase Brian’s Martian credentials, and he had to stature to try. That was just the kind of thing that made me wary of doing Brian’s biographies. I asked Brian to provide me some ammunition, in case I had to do battle with NASA and the space debunkers. He gave me the Alan Shepard and Werner von Braun anecdotes. Fortunately, I never had to do battle, and that aspect of Brian’s career, and his unique distinction, will likely remain intact. But it was one more episode that gave me a bad taste regarding debunkers. When they weren’t being criminally dishonest, they were moronic, even the “smartest” of them. As I have written, it seems that most such irrationality is not intentional, but because their brains turn off when information threatens their cherished beliefs. They are incapable of rationally addressing the issues, which is ironic for a movement that claims to speak for reason and a scientific approach to dealing with the evidence. But it seems that that particular space debunker has been on special assignment for some time, like Mr. Skeptic appeared to be, so I was not going to waste any more time and energy with him.

One cyberpal worked in Mission Control more than a generation after my father did, and my adventures in getting Brian’s NASA biography published was depressingly familiar to him. NASA had become a shadow of its former self since the Apollo days, with its halls at Mission Control full of people seeking lost glory.

But the first stage of my Brian biography project was complete, and in the end, the astronaut corps treated me fairly and better than I expected. Brian’s bio was about the same length as Neil Armstrong’s, so I really could not complain. I was able to get in Brian’s professional relationships with Sagan and O’Neill, which were among his most significant, space-wise, and I got his Martian credentials in there. I am happy with how it turned out.

As I recall, I took a couple month break, bio-wise, after my NASA experience, before focusing on Brian’s Wikipedia bio, which was abysmal at the time. You can’t really see what the article looked like before I wrote the one that is largely how it stands today, but it was in very poor shape. Just now, I had to reinstate the link to Brian’s Ph.D. thesis, which I am hosting on my site until someplace else hosts it again. An “editor” erased my change, to put it back to a dead link to where NASA used to host it. That is typical of the kind of maddening experiences that I have had with Wikipedia. I’ll save my Wikipedia adventures and Brian’s Moon landings controversy for coming posts.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

The issue of Brian and the Moon landings brings up mixed feelings for me, on a few levels. Brian’s appearance on that FOX TV show is what “made” me go as deeply on the Moon landing evidence as I did, and my Apollo work actually brought Brian into my life as a colleague. But I never got Brian over the hump on the Moon landings. If he had done the work, he would have, but he didn’t take the time to. There were several painful aspects of the situation, and one was the ardor and even dishonesty of both camps on the Moon landings, trying to portray Brian as taking their side when he didn’t. For the record, Brian thought that it was exceedingly unlikely yet still possible that NASA faked the Moon landings, or at least some of the photographic record. He had several reasons for thinking that way, which both sides of the issue generally either denied or blew out of proportion, turning Brian into a political football. Brian regretted his involvement in the issue until his death.

I have written at length about my journey into the Apollo evidence and don’t need to repeat it here, but my view is that the Moon landings happened as advertised, with chemical rockets going to and coming from the Moon, with genuine Moon rocks retrieved from the lunar surface, and no photographic or other evidence provided by the “faked Moon landing” crowd has withstood scrutiny, as far as providing evidence of faked Moon landings. Most such “evidence” quickly crumbled upon inspection, although some took longer to get to the bottom of. Whether evidence of ET encounters was covered up is another matter, and I think that there was a cover-up, but it is an open question to me just how much the Moonwalking astronauts encountered ETs, although Greer is adamant that Armstrong and Aldrin both did, which is partly why they came back such “changed” men. I believe that that situation also contributed to Brian’s faked Moon landings musings, no matter how informal and offhand they were.

I will now tell the chronology as I know it to be, and my participation, regarding the brouhaha that centered on Brian’s statements. My cyberpal who worked in Mission Control more than a generation after my father did recently wrote that NASA’s culture of secrecy contributed to “paranoid” musings such as Brian’s. I have no doubt about that, but it was also far more than that. As I have written, Brian and my father had to get Top Secret security clearances to work at NASA, which in those days meant a pretty deep dive, such as the FBI’s interviewing their first grade teachers and childhood neighbors. The Space Race (which JFK tried to end) was a Cold War effort, full of anticommunist paranoia, cloak-and-dagger games, etc.

I have no idea when Brian began having suspicions about the Moon landings, and the first time it may have come to him were Buzz Aldrin’s replies to Brian when they shared an office at SAIC. When I was 17 in 1975, at Boys State in Sacramento, a Moonwalking astronaut addressed our group (it may have been Scott). He was naturally asked about what it was like on the Moon, and he replied with something like it would take a day to begin to tell about it, and he immediately dismissed the subject. That was probably the typical brushoff that people received, and perhaps Brian got one or two of those kinds of replies before he asked Buzz about it.

Brian’s leaving the Establishment was peppered with many events that soured him on the Establishment, which was a far cry from his flag-saluting Eagle Scout days. Brian’s high-profile protest in 1970 of the Southeast Asian invasions, which was the same year that he published his book on his astronaut experiences and solidified his NASA gadfly status even more, was a key indicator of where his career and life was heading, although he became very active on Capitol Hill.

But while all of that may have increased Brian’s cognitive dissonance and gradual suspicions about NASA, hosting a UFO conference and being approached by the military, and almost dying immediately after rejecting their “offer,” was when Brian began to get radicalized. I strongly suspect that those events are where a lot of Brian’s “skepticism” toward the Moon landings came from. After his near-fatal encounter with the military over the UFO issue, Brian was understandably open to anything in those realms being a fabrication or cover-up.

Brian’s brush with death was certainly part of why he was a high-profile supporter of Greer’s Disclosure Project. The reality of that milieu, when you begin playing at those levels, is so far beyond what cubicle-dwellers, conspiracy enthusiasts, and Internet surfers encounter in their lives that they have virtually no conception of it, from what the situations are to how you can react to them. Paranoia is a common reaction, as well as a naïve denial that can see somebody keep stumbling forward into those areas to the point where they can risk and lose their lives. It is not a place for the faint of heart. I have played enough in those milieus to where I actively avoid them, and I actively avoid people who think that they have what it takes to navigate those waters, when they have yet to get their toes wet. Having my life wrecked once was enough for me.

In the spring of 2001, I was stumbling and fumbling through the Moon landings evidence, but slowly making progress. The neutral point discrepancy vanished for me back in 1998, but in early 2001 I decided to get to the bottom of the faked Moon landing evidence, and by June, I had only a few lingering doubts when I published the first draft of my conspiracy and cover-up essay. I still had my email address on my site then (which I would remove less than a year later), and that essay elicited a great deal of feedback, and has been one of the most popular essays on my site ever since. I was soon introduced to Jay Windley, who is the 800-pound gorilla of the Moon landings controversy, and he answered my few remaining questions well and very professionally. Jay has plenty of savoir faire. I soon had about no doubt left, and then Jay led me to finding Armstrong’s leap up the Lunar Module ladder. That sealed it for me, in more than one way. Ever since reading Moongate in the early 1990s, the lack of any “feats” performed on the Moon by the astronauts, which would have ruled out Earth gravity, was an area of doubt for me.

There was a great deal of Sturm und Drang over the feats, or lack of them, for many years, and seeing that obscure footage (which I saw live in 1969, as did hundreds of millions of people), which was not part of the “feat” debate in those days, removed 99.9% of my lingering doubts. Armstrong’s leap happened on the Moon. I contacted Brian with the news, and he soon invited me to meet with him in California, which was the beginning of our close collaboration. Brian was highly impressed with Armstrong’s leap, but still wondered if it could have been faked with wires or some other trick. I introduced him to Jay, which led to this page of Jay’s.

But two years later, Brian wrote this in his Re-Inheriting the Earth:


“To set the record straight, there is no doubt in my mind that the capsules went into orbit around the Moon, because of the photographs, signals received on Earth, and capabilities of the enormous Saturn V rocket booster. It is conceivable but highly doubtful that the lunar landings didn’t take place. Who am I to say one way or another, since I wasn’t there? Regardless, the Apollo program was a great success. It gave me a valuable reference point for what we must do now.”


That is not exactly an endorsement of faked Moon landings. Brian never did the work to become convinced one way or another. To be fair to Brian, he had bigger issues on his plate. I can imagine what attention Brian received over his Moon landing stance: I was bombarded. I am still approached to this day by people who argue for faked Moon landings. Sigh. I have yet to see any evidence, when approached, which is not the same old “evidence” that was discredited long ago, as disinformation is constantly recycled to dupe the gullible, and today I consider the issue not very far removed from Flat Earth theorizing. One pal knows somebody who truly believes that Earth is flat, in the USA, no less. It is no joke. So, the faked Moon landing crowd may exist for a very long time.

For the record, that Fox TV show that gave Brian such a high profile on this issue officially approached Brian on the Cydonia issue, to get their foot in the door (in Brian’s words, they “ambushed” him). It was a wide-ranging interview, and those ten seconds on the Moon landings, which they aired on their show, was what they really sought. That was a typical media performance, especially for Fox, whose news shows resemble Nazi propaganda, which feature Dick Cheney holding forth to this day on all the WMD that Iraq had, as if he lives in another dimension, or that Global Warming is some kind of hoax.

Was Brian being irresponsible with his public Apollo musings? That is arguable, but I think that Brian was outspoken on many issues, most of which were vitally important, and he had no idea what he was getting into when he gave that interview. He regretted those ten seconds for the rest of his life. It wrecked what little remaining relationship that he had with the astronaut corps, and undoubtedly had something to do with NASA’s stonewalling me over Brian’s astronaut bio. After our meeting in August 2001, we never talked about the Moon landings again, as far as their authenticity went. We had bigger fish to fry, and we were not going to waste any more time on that trivial issue….at least until I began to write Brian’s Wikipedia bio in 2010. His Wikipedia bio was dominated by the fake Moon landings issue. I knew that I could not make it go away, but I did not want it to dominate Brian’s bio, as it was a tabloid issue. It really is crazy that that became Brian’s claim to “fame” late in his life.

You can see the edit history of his bio. I began making my changes in December 2010, and you can see others joining in and erasing my work and putting the Moon landings back into prominence, with its own section, after I tried to make it less prominent. Wikipedia’s “editors” were not going to let the issue rest. At least one I think was an Establishment asset, joining Wikipedia solely to erase my work. Of course, they were mostly anonymous cowards. After months of fruitlessness (I worked 70 hours a week at the time), I informed Brian that it was not going well and asked him what he wanted to do. He then provided me with what truly became his last word on the subject. But Wikipedia’s editors erased my references to it, as if they wanted the distorted version of Brian’s views to dominate his Wikipedia bio. Wikipedia is truly worse than worthless on many key issues, I use it with great caution, and hope that I never have to play editor/contributor there again. God forbid that an article on Dennis is ever written, as it would likely be pure disinformation. I doubt that I would do battle there regarding Dennis, partly because I would be too interested a party.

When Brian wrote his last word on the Moon landings, he informed me that Jay’s page on him was overblown, but we never got into the details of why he thought so. In June 2011, Brian wrote his last email to me, invited me to South America, and was planning on promoting my strategy for bringing free energy to the world. He died the next month. He was a great man, and I miss him dearly. His voice is very needed in these dark days.

I was working my usual insane hours at my day job, and when I took a career break in early 2013 to write my big essay, getting Brian’s bio issue resolved, especially regarding the Moon landings issue, was on my list of things to do.

The issue with Brian’s “last word” was that it was only hosted at my site, which is not “notable” enough for Wikipedia, although its editors have linked to my site plenty of times over the years (which eventually gets erased, but I still see traffic come to my site from Wikipedia, especially the Russian version, mostly regarding Paul Bragg, I believe). I reached out to all of the big names of the Moon landings controversy and related issues, trying to get it hosted someplace “notable” enough so that Wikipedia’s editors would not erase the reference to it. Nobody helped. The responses were a variety of excuses and challenges, if I ever heard back at all, and my impression was that Brian’s last word was not what they wanted to hear. The members of Jay’s forum were the most naïve and irrational of all, with lawyer wannabees and other Establishment worshippers holding forth.

After that experience, which was unfortunately not very surprising, and just one more confirmation of my journey’s primary lesson, then the miracle happened. With Brian dead and no longer a very viable political football to both sides of the issue, sanity finally prevailed. Brian’s astronaut days are certainly his most “notable” accomplishment, although he would probably have met Wikipedia’s “notability” criteria even if he was not an astronaut, but to be fair, his astronaut days played a big part of opening the doors to being Carl Sagan’s, Gerard O’Neill’s, and Mo Udall’s colleague, as well as getting his pal Buzz Aldrin a job. Of course, if free energy makes its appearance before humanity flushes itself down the toilet, Brian will have more than one professional biography written about him, as will Dennis, and probably me, too.

With the faked Moon landings issue dying down in recent years, not the least of which is photos from the Moon piling more impressive evidence onto the stack, the faked Moon landing crowd has dwindled, and Brian’s bio began getting treatment from NASA types, and one of them erased the entire faked Moon landings section of his bio as unsourced tabloid fodder. Hurray! I can live with Brian’s Wikipedia bio as it stands today. Virtually his entire Wikipedia bio as it stands today is my work. We’ll see if somebody tries to resurrect the faked Moon landings issue, especially if they try to ignore Brian’s last word on the subject. I may dive back into the fray then, but I hope it never happens, and the issue is left to rest in peace.

All in all, the faked Moon landings issue was very educational for me, and not just the evidentiary part of it, but how I got sucked into the milieu, beginning with Moongate, how I navigated the morass of ax grinders and others, and how I learned to stay away from it. I learned a lot about how to evaluate such evidence, how to write about it, how to deal with inquiries, and how to do battle at Wikipedia. It brought Brian into my life in a big way, and was the most maddening issue of dealing with his legacy, which thankfully resolved itself, without my intervention.

If people want these kinds of conspiracist situations to mercifully disappear, the USA’s national security state needs to be dismantled, for starters. There are so many evil activities hidden behind the fraudulent shroud of “national security” that it provides the grist for fertile and paranoid imaginations to run amok. The faked Moon landings issue is just one of many that have sprung up since JFK’s assassination and cover-up, and it is ironic indeed that JFK tried to end the Space Race in his life’s last months, which may well have been related to his murder. If that Soviet-American mission to the Moon had happened, the faked Moon landings issue would have never arisen and the Cold War might have ended back in the 1960s. Those are big what ifs.

I don’t shrink from controversial issues, but I don’t want to tangle with another one like the fake Moon landings issue. In the end, it was related to improving my scientific literacy and honing my tools of discernment, and for that, I am grateful. I am going to wind down my scientific literacy posts for now and focus on my big essay update for this year. I may get it done in June, but September seems more likely. We’ll see how it goes.

Best,

Wade

Edited June 10, 2016 by Wade Frazier

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

I am taking a little Ventura break today, and this is a post on what we know and how. When you have direct personal experience, especially of the spectacular kind, you know. The Onion, as usual, has pithy things to say under the rubric of satire, such as a conspiracy theorist convincing Neil Armstrong that he never walked on the Moon. I have yet to see any evidence that the conspiracy theorists on the faked moon landings have presented that held up under scrutiny, and most of their “evidence” was embarrassingly bad. But imagine how Neil Armstrong must have felt with that blizzard of conspiracy theorizing that he never really walked on the Moon. What did he think about it? I never walked on the Moon, and was not there when Neil went there, but I have as little doubt as it is possible to have that he walked on the Moon.

Three weeks after the JFK assassination, Gary Wean knew that Oswald was not the lone nut assassin of JFK. I imagine that Gary thought similarly to Bobby Kennedy, that the Warren Report was rubbish.

I am nearly finished reading Life on the Edge, which is about the effects of quantum mechanics in biology. But several times in their book, the authors dismiss the paranormal as “pseudoscientific” and with other name calling. They were stumping for materialism, in what seems to be an effort to have quantum effects be the explanation for seemingly paranormal events (or dismissing them on flimsy grounds). When I was 16, I had my mystical awakening, in spectacular fashion, and I know that materialism is a false faith. Brian O had his mystical awakening five years later while performing the same exercise. Like me, and others like us, we all know that materialism is a religion based on a false foundation, and when I see all sorts of materialistic bromides issuing forth from scientists, what is perhaps the most amazing is how irrational the attacks and dismissals are, from such supposedly intelligent people. It does not matter how involved and sophisticated their materialist explanations are, I know that they are all wrong. It only takes one event like I experienced to falsify materialism, and I had many such events.

Similarly, my pal has to laugh at scientists who say that FE is “contrary to the laws of physics.” My friend knows, while those scientists can only regurgitate their textbooks, and the efforts that TPTB did not silence, sequester, etc.

Likewise, all the people out there who tell Big Lies (1, 2) in order to establish Dennis’s criminality” are actually criminals themselves, but they tell Big Lies that benefit the Establishment, so they get a free pass, while Dennis nearly loses his life because he failed (actually, I failed) to file a form, and those liars endlessly gull the naïve and gullible. Can you imagine how obscene such “theorizing” about Dennis’s “criminality” is to me? There is nobody else like him on Earth, he has had Godzilla’s full attention many times, but the greatest damage to his efforts was committed by his “allies,” and the gossip-sphere is full of disinformation that people lap up, which literally drove me out of a forum recently. I know, and they have no idea.

Best,

Wade

Edited September 19, 2016 by Wade Frazier

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

Not much time for a post this morning, with the mayhem of my life right now.  This will be about a book I began reading last night, on vaccinations.  The primary author is a nephrologist whose patients got kidney failure immediately after receiving vaccinations.  It is a very familiar story, kind of like Mullenix and fluoride.  The doctor initially only knew the party line on vaccinations, but when she began having patients whose kidneys failed immediately after vaccination, her colleagues did not want to hear about it, and instead she was challenged and ridiculed.  When patients had drug reactions that led to kidney failure, the drugs would immediately cease use, but noting vaccination reactions was beyond the pale, and she had to fight to keep her patients from getting vaccinated while she was treating them.

She eventually left her lucrative practice to study vaccinations, and the book I am reading is one fruit of her efforts.  As with fluoridation, a poisonous substance is ingested, often compulsorily, and at their most optimistic, those interventions cause many side-effects, including death, and the credit that they take for improving the public’s health is highly dubious.  

That nephrologist’s book covers the early “victories” of vaccination, such as smallpox, as she shows that the victories had nothing to do with vaccinations, and in fact, vaccinations have been public health hazards all along, worthless and even harmful interventions that “coincidentally” are lucrative for the medical racket.  Any dissent has been harshly dealt with from the beginning.  

The surreal part of vaccinations and fluoridation is that the lies and propaganda remain virtually unchallenged to this day, and anybody who dissents is a member of the tinfoil hat crowd, even doctors whose patients are killed by vaccinations.  

In a way, it is a structural situation, not too far removed from Ed and Noam’s propaganda model, although it would be naïve to think that nobody is on it.  Dark pathers at the top rub their hands in delight at the situation.  Make huge sums of money harming the oblivious public, and then make huge sums dealing with the disaster that the interventions cause.  Kind of like Fishbein, cigarettes, and cancer.  

Best,

Wade