Brian O'Leary, Mars, and the Moon

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

I am going to start a new thread in my forum with this post, and one at the Education Forum.  This is going to be about Brian O’Leary, Mars, and the Moon.  I already had a thread on the Moon landings and Brian, but want to broaden it a little.  This is going to cover controversial territory, and what has spurred it is the latest Mars colonization talk.  I read this yesterday.  The author is a Peak Oiler, and I have never seen a Peak Oiler embrace free energy, and I have tried with more than Heinberg.  But hearing about Elon Musk’s Mars colonization plans brought up a lot, not the least of which is that I have yet to see Brian’s name come up, and he was the first human officially asked to go to Mars.  

Brian’s life, like those of most of my fellow travelers, can be hard to believe at times.  His fascination with space began at age eight, and he was writing about space satellites before Sputnik launched, which puzzled his teacher and classmates.  He took the path to becoming an astronomer, and his work at Berkeley, as he earned his doctorate, not only set his path to becoming an astronaut, but his subsequent political persuasion was surely influenced by his Berkeley days, as it was for Uncle Ed.  Somewhat strangely, I nearly went to Berkeley, but it was about chasing a girl, not trying to get into radical politics.  

Brian’s astronaut interview has to be one of the top ten most bizarre in history, as he was asked/ordered to go to Mars.  His first day on the job at NASA was like a baseball bat over the head, as Deke Slayton informed them that NASA had just lost the budget battle on Capitol Hill with the Pentagon, and those new astronauts were not needed (the “XS-11”), and other aspects of the astronaut culture quickly drove Brian from NASA.  He lasted about as long as my father did.  Brian was really not astronaut material, being more of a poet at heart than a space soldier following orders.

But while Brian was an astronaut, he trained with the Mars mission in mind, and he publicly talked about some of the tricks discussed back then for how they would get to Mars.  It was only many years later that Brian learned that he was picked because Werner von Braun was set on making a rocket for Mars (a big one), and Brian was the first talent in the stable for von Braun’s Mars dream.  

Brian’s life after NASA was an odyssey that few life stories can measure up to. Being asked/ordered to go to Mars was an amusing footnote to his life.  Carl Sagan recruited Brian to Cornell, Brian was soon protesting the USA’s genocidal bludgeoning of Southeast Asia’s peasants, and eventually advised presidential candidates.  He advocated space mining and space colonies while at Princeton, smugly sipping his sherry with Nobel laureates as they debunked and ridiculed the paranormal, until that fateful day when Brian had his mystical awakening performing the same exercise that I did five years earlier.  Then Brian’s adventures truly began.  

There is much more to come.  

Best,

Wade

Edited February 19, 2018 by Wade Frazier

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

At Berkeley, with his mentor Donald Rea, Brian performed the experiments and wrote the scientific papers that led to his becoming an astronaut.  They wrote about Venus, Mercury, and particularly Mars, which is what attracted von Braun’s interest.  After he left NASA, Brian became quite the NASA gadfly, not only leading high-profile protests of the USA’s genocidal imperial behavior, but he wrote many high-profile challenges of NASA’s activities and goals, which had plenty to do with his being the only NASA astronaut who did not have a biography on NASA’s site.  It was a bit of an adventure to get it published.  

After Brian left NASA, Carl Sagan recruited Brian to teach at Cornell, where they studied lunar mascons and were the world’s two leading Mars experts.  Brian became very politically active and advised several presidential candidates, beginning with George McGovern in 1968.  After his stint on Capitol Hill with Mo Udall, Brian taught at Princeton, at the behest of his astronaut-interview roommate Gerard O’Neill, and they studied the feasibility of asteroid mining and space colonies.  Several Nobel laureates were on Princeton’s staff, and Brian smugly sipped sherry with them as they ridiculed and debunked the paranormal.  Brian was quite the academic vagabond, teaching at Cal Tech, Berkeley, Hampshire College, and elsewhere, never finding a place to call home.  

By 1979, Brian had already lived quite a life, but his big adventures had yet to begin.  His departure from mainstream science, even though asteroid mining and space colonies were pretty fringe in those days, began when he took a human potential class in 1979 and had a remote viewing experience while performing the same exercise that I did five years previously, and they gave us our mystical awakenings.  Neither one of us knew it at the time, but it was the beginning of the end of our Establishment scientist days.  We could no longer drink the Kool-Aid of materialism.  I did not leave the path for another three years, and it took Brian nearly a decade to leave the fold.  About the time that he left Princeton, he had a paranormal experience during a car accident that he probably should not have survived.  After that, there was no looking back.  Brian left Princeton for space contractor SAIC in LA, moving there in the same year that I did, for another of the many overlaps in our journeys.  I could have walked to his house from mine, but it was another decade before we met.

Buzz Aldrin was so rudderless after the Moon landings that he tried his hand at selling cars before Brian got him a job at SAIC, and they shared the same office.  If you shared an office with Buzz, do you think that you might have asked him what it was like on the Moon?  Brian and Ed Mitchell were prominent members of Steven Greer’s Disclosure Project, and Ed and Buzz needed therapy after returning from the Moon; Buzz ended up in a mental institution, and Ed refused to discuss his time on the Moon.  Those responses, or lack of them, contributed to Brian’s suspicion that not all was as publicly presented about the Apollo Moon landings.  But that was far from the only influence on Brian’s views.  

In Steven Greer’s recent book, he alleged that the Apollo 11 flag-planting ceremony was also performed on a sound stage on Earth, so that NASA would have some passable footage if they needed it.  That certainly had something to do with Brian’s statements of doubt about the Moon landings, which he regretted for the rest of his life.  He did not regret them for the doubts that he expressed, but for the firestorm of controversy that it caused, which overwhelmed everything else about him.  I had a devil of a time with his Wikipedia biography over that issue, which led to what truly became Brian’s final word on the issue.  Greer also wrote that Armstrong and Aldrin encountered ETs on the Moon, but the cover-up apparatus went into overdrive.

For me, it was kind of strange to read Greer’s statement on the flag planting ceremony.  I went deep on the Moon landing evidence long ago and never found convincing evidence of faked Moon landings or faked evidence, so reading Greer’s account last year made me wonder about where Greer was getting his information.  That seemed like it came from the conspiracist rumor mills.  Maybe that fake ceremony was indeed filmed so that NASA could have an ace in the hole if they needed it, but another allegation in Greer’s book made me wonder.

Brian also got sucked into the Face on Mars controversy, and while he never said that the Face was artificial, he stated that it was intriguing enough that NASA should take better pictures of it when it returned to Mars, and I was on the phone with him as he downloaded the 1998 image like we all did back then, on dial-up modems.  In Greer’s latest book, one of his sources said that the Face was a real artificial artifact, made about 40,000 years ago, by ETs.  When I read that, it seemed to come from the tabloid pages.  While I still wonder about the Face’s potential artificiality, as it still has some striking features, such as the “headdress,” I would be very surprised if the Face was artificial.  

Brian knew Tom Van Flandern since his Georgetown days, and Van Flandern was a big advocate of the artificiality of the Face, making some outrageous statements about it.  Van Flandern challenged many tenets of mainstream physics.  Brian wrote a scientific paper with Van Flandern.  I met Van Flandern and was in his circles a little, and he could concoct some rather hasty hypotheses.  

I want to acknowledge that Greer’s reporting on the Face and a faked flag-planting exercise, or Van Flandern’s outrageous (“a billion times greater than chance”) statement about the 1998 Face image, can make these issues seem to come from the tinfoil hat crowd.  I agree how bizarre some of those allegations are, but could they be true?  

If nothing else, those kinds of allegations and reactions to Brian’s asking about what it was like on the Moon provide plenty of evidence for Brian’s doubts, however modest they might have been.  Brian was not just making it up from his fevered imagination.  He always approached those issues with a scientist’s caution.  But he had plenty of other reasons for doubting the official story on these subjects, some of which come next.

Best,

Wade

Edited February 19, 2018 by Wade Frazier

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

During Brian’s SAIC days, he briefed people such as McNamara, Wolfowitz, and Perle, and it was a strange experience, as they acted like robots.  But Brian was at SAIC to promote space colonies and asteroid mining, he refused to work on Reagan’s Star Wars, and lost his job just before he would have vested retirement benefits.  His office was literally given to an Air Force general who was showered with millions to figure out how the USA could win a nuclear war.  That was Brian’s last job for the Establishment.  Brian told me that he could have played ball and retired very comfortably, but he would have sold his soul in the process (it was not the first time that I heard something like that).  He soon began exploring the fringes full time.  

On that fateful day when I met Brian in 1991, he was just getting his feet wet in the free energy milieu.  Within five minutes of meeting him, he gave me Sparky Sweet’s name, and within a half hour, we were driving past the front gates of Wright Patterson Air Force Base and joking about Hangar 18 and the Blue Room.  

The next year, Brian sponsored a UFO conference under the auspices of a new science organization that he co-founded (with a co-founder of the Peace Corps), and was made an “offer” by the American military to do classified UFO work.  Brian rejected the offer and immediately afterward had a “heart attack.”  His health never recovered and the incident shortened his life.  When we traded notes in 2001, Brian described the details of his “heart attack,” and he concluded that his heart attack was the military’s response to his “no.”  He was made the offer that he could not refuse, and they used their exotic toys to try to kill him.  

Brian epitomized the ET-free energy connection, which Steven Greer later pursued.  When I told Brian in our note-trading session of my friend’s underground technology show, his response was, “So, he got a show from the spooks.”  Brian was not surprised, and was more interested in my CIA contract agent relative.  

This milieu trips the light fantastic and then some.  I have gone to see UFOs myself several times, and always saw something bizarre (I also visited James’s Ranch in 2015).  My circles are not all that large, but the stories I have heard from fellow travelers could be doozies.  Adam Trombly’s life story is the only one that I know of that compares to Dennis’s.  For the rest of us, our lives have been relatively dull, and being asked/ordered to go to Mars was only an amusing footnote.  

One pal was told by an astronaut about a days-long ET encounter at the International Space Station.  When such events happen, the secrecy apparatus jumps into action and the astronauts and related personnel are “read in,” but they can’t always stay silent.  The astronaut’s blurting out the encounter to somebody who could be trusted with the information is not that uncommon, and such encounters formed the basis of Greer’s Disclosure Project.  I was always most impressed with the witnesses who saw something that they shouldn’t have.  

Best,

Wade

Edited February 20, 2018 by Wade Frazier

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

I studied organized skepticism since the early 1990s, and my worst suspicions were confirmed and then some when I interacted with a prominent “skeptic.”  Today, I consider organized skepticism to be a criminal enterprise.  That “skeptic” became my Internet stalker for a decade, and the experience was much worse for people such as Dennis and Brian.  I watched Dennis get heckled the day that I met him, and that was only a gentle preview of what lied ahead.  Brian’s life-shortening brush with death was only the beginning for him.  

Brian told me that as he left the sherry-sipping comfort of the Establishment and the more that he pursued the truth, the more isolated and ostracized he became.  During his Ivy League professor and Capitol Hill days, Brian’s op eds ran in the New York Times and his books were published by major publishing houses.  As he began navigating the fringes, he eventually lost all of his access.  His last books were self-published, and one such effort bankrupted him, when his distributor went bankrupt with the entire print run of Brian’s latest book in his warehouse.  

In his last years, when Brian traveled and spoke at conferences, he had a professional heckler stalk him, and Brian dreaded each encounter.  Brian had a publicly available email address to his death (he was braver than me! ), and would sometimes send inquiries to me.  During an exchange not long before he died, he said that the previous few days had been rough ones, as he dealt with personal attacks via email.

After the months-long adventure of getting Brian’s NASA bio published, one of the leading space “skeptics” attacked Brian’s Martian credentials in one of the most idiotic efforts that I ever saw.  I heard elsewhere that the space debunker not only engaged in pedestrian, even fraudulent, debunking, but he also subtly threatened his debunking targets by reciting his NSA and other spook connections.  I believe that the man is somehow on the payroll, as Mr. Skeptic likely was.  If I outlive that space debunker, I will be more forthcoming about my interactions with him.  It was not all bad, but his behavior was just more of what gives organized skepticism a bad name among the informed.  His attack led to my asking Brian what he could give me, if a campaign to expunge his Martian credentials was launched (that space “skeptic” was in a position to mount one), and it led to Brian’s giving me his Alan Shepard and Werner von Braun anecdotes.  So, some good came from it.  I am happy that I got Brian’s bios done while he was alive, and Brian’s Martian credentials seem to be permanently on the record now.  That is what the truly great people of our times have to deal with.

Now, the narrative gets a little stranger.  Humanity’s fascination with Mars is ancient, and plans for Mars missions were published before Sputnik was launched.  Brian is history’s first human to be officially and publicly asked/ordered to go to another planet.  In recent years, the Mars colonization talk has reached a fevered pitch, and that article on Elon Musk’s Mars colonization plans spurred this series of posts.  What is peculiar about Musk’s stated rationale (such as a preserving a remnant of humanity that could survive whatever catastrophe (probably self-inflicted) that Earth-bound humanity might face), is that these plans have long been known in my circles, and Musk is literally parroting one of Godzilla’s contingency plans with this latest Mars colonization effort.  

One of my fellow travelers was approached long ago on Godzilla’s “terraform Mars” project, which he considered insane, partly because we have a perfectly good planet to live on, and those behind the suppression of free energy and attendant technologies that would usher in the Fifth Epoch instead threaten to make Earth uninhabitable with their evil games.  Dwight Eisenhower’s great granddaughter has gone public with efforts to recruit her to Godzilla’s Mars colonization project.

So, for a “visionary” such as Musk to be a big booster of a Mars colonization project, while literally reciting some of the GCs’ rationale, is a very curious situation, and in none of the Mars colonization talk in recent years have I seen Brian’s name come up even once.  Even in death, he is shunted to the side.  It is similar to an effort to resurrect Dennis’s heat pump technology without mentioning him.  This is the typical treatment that the true pioneers have received.  

I’ll make another post or two, but I’ll begin winding down this series.  

Best,

Wade

Edited February 21, 2018 by Wade Frazier

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

When a member of my circle was approached to help terraform Mars, his reply was manifold.  Mars is geologically dead, which means that there are no plate tectonics to circulate elements (called “cycles” on Earth, such as the carbon cycle), as the radioactivity that powers Earth’s tectonics died out long ago on Mars, as it has on the Moon.  The smaller the planet or moon, the faster it will become geologically inert, at least for rocky planets and moons.  There is water in Mars’s crust, quite a bit of it, but Mars lost its ocean long ago.  If not for oxygenic photosynthesis, Earth would have lost its ocean long ago, too, and with it, life as we know it.  Earth’s internal dynamics gave rise to its magnetic field, which helps shield Earth’s atmosphere from the worst of the solar wind and the Sun’s radiation.  Mars has none of that.  Today, Mars’s atmosphere is 1% as thick as Earth’s, and far less than 1% of it is oxygen, and its temperature averages about 80 degrees below zero Fahrenheit.  None of that is very conducive to life as we know it, much less a transplanted civilization.  But the people who tried to recruit that guy said that they had all the answers, and he laughed at them.  Without free energy and antigravity, any kind of terraforming project is going to be wishful thinking.  Chemical rockets are not going to begin to get it done.  With free energy and antigravity, many terraforming projects begin to become feasible.

That is one reason why I would be very surprised if the Face on Mars was artificial.  Who the heck could live there to make it, and why make it?  While Brian entertained the idea that the Face was artificial, his erstwhile colleague Carl Sagan misrepresented the evidence to dismiss the idea.  Sagan did not play fair, although I consider it likely that the Face is a natural formation.  Sagan’s career as a debunker was a dubious one.  

The idea of terraforming Mars as an elite survival enclave, while that very same elite toys with making Earth uninhabitable (and withholds the technologies to turn Earth into something resembling heaven), is the height of evil and insanity, but such is the nature of the lust for power and control.  It can never be satiated, and as Uncle Noam said, the institutional ideologies rank hegemony over survival.  The GCs are in good company, although their saner members advocate the release of those technologies from their Golden Hoard, and one of their factions likely gave my friend a little demonstration of some of them.  

Richard Hoagland dragged Brian into the Face issue, and Brian eventually concluded that the “City” and other features of Cydonia that Hoagland argued were artificial were likely natural formations instead.  I was at Hoagland’s 1994 presentation at Ohio State University (where I also watched Manufacturing Consent in 1992), where he made the case for artificial structures on the Moon (there very well may be, but I would put more trust in somebody other than Hoagland to determine that), and I attended his 1998 conference in Seattle, where I met Tom Van Flandern and Tom Bearden.  Co-finding evidence of Armstrong’s Leap on the Moon brought Brian into my life as a colleague (we had our seminal note-trading session several weeks later), and Hoagland soon tried to recruit me as one of his image analyzers.  I declined the invitation and replied that I only knew enough to be dangerous, and I was then assured how easy image analysis was.  That made me really wonder about the quality of Hoagland’s work.  Brian independently developed the same feeling about Hoagland’s work, although he still entertained the idea that the Face might be artificial until he died, while holding to his scientist’s caution and advocating more investigation.  

The Martian and lunar milieus are strange ones in ways, and Brian was right in the middle of them from the beginning of his career.  The year before he died, another Mars colonization plan made publicity waves.  They did not plan the launch until the 2030s, and Brian joked that he would volunteer, and that when the mission launched, he would be about 90, but would finally get his chance to go to Mars. 

Since Brian’s death, several Mars colonization plans have been announced, and I never saw Brian’s name mentioned as the original Mars mission designee.  Buzz Aldrin has been the most prominent advocate lately, along with Musk, and I have to wonder how many of Buzz’s ideas came from Brian.  

All in all, these are fascinating subjects and were big aspects of Brian’s life and career.  I am so happy that we got his Martian credentials published by NASA (the astronaut corps had no problem with Brian’s Martian credentials, even though that space debunker did).  Time will tell if posterity gives Brian his due.  To also be the most prominent scientific advocate of free energy puts Brian in rarefied air indeed.  If free energy technology ever escapes its current sequestering, Brian will likely be a prominent historical figure, although the usual process is to bury people like him in obscurity while his work is stolen.  Not if I can help it.

I am going to end these Mars posts for now, but this subject will likely keep rearing its head in the future.  

Best,

Wade

Edited February 22, 2018 by Wade Frazier