Claims, Contradictions and Corroborations: LUNAR ANOMALIES

Alien Base: The Evidence for Extraterrestrial Colonization of Earth: LUNAR ANOMALIES

Despite absurdities and contradictions in Adamski’s claims about the Moon, some mysteries remain. There are, for example, areas which suggest artificially constructed grooves or ‘rilles’. These are usually explained geologically in terms of ancient river beds, bygone seismic activity, or collapsed ‘lava tubes’; nonetheless, the rilles on the Gassendi crater (see plates) look artificial.

Also of interest are so-called ‘Transient Lunar Phenomena’ (TLP). Astronomer Patrick Moore, who coined the term, speculatively attributed the TLPs to ‘gaseous emissions caused by moonquakes’. Even more interesting is the fact that water vapour has been detected, ‘erupting like geysers through cracks on the lunar surface’, according to instruments put there by Apollo XI and XII.

A water vapour cloud of more than 10 square miles was apparently discovered, and while Apollo VIII was in lunar orbit, astronaut Frank Borman was reported as having said: ‘It looks like clouds down there.’ This bolsters Adamski’s assertion that tenuous clouds occasionally form.

In late 1996 the Pentagon announced that radar soundings taken in mid-1995 by Clementine, an unmanned spacecraft, detected what seemed to be an enormous lake of frozen water at the bottom of the solar system’s largest crater, known as the Aitkin basin, on the Moon’s south pole. The crater itself is more than seven miles deep and the apparent ice lake is estimated to be tens of feet deep, covering an area of 30 to 50 square miles. Scientists at the Pentagon’s Ballistic Missile Defense Organization, which sponsored Clementine, stated that the radar soundings of the Moon’s polar areas had convinced them that the substance in the crater is indeed water ice, though further data were needed before this can be confirmed.

An immense and permanent shadow in the crater prevents the ice from evaporating. Nothing like it was found in the Moon’s north pole nor in another southern area exposed directly to the Sun. The presence of water on the otherwise apparently dry Moon is probably due to a collision with a comet (composed largely of ice) perhaps 3.6 billion years ago, the scientists speculated. This important discovery will facilitate living on the Moon, when eventually we establish colonies there.

Stranger still are what appear to be artificial constructions occasionally observed on the Moon. Frank Halstead, Curator of the Darling Observatory in Duluth, Minnesota, described an object he and his assistant observed through a telescope on 6 July 1954. It looked like a ‘straight black line’ on the floor of the crater Piccolomini, where no such line had been noted before. It has not been seen since. The object was also confirmed by the Tulane Observatory.

Halstead also reported seeing a cigar-shaped craft about 800 feet long, later joined by a disc estimated to be 100 feet in diameter, while crossing the Mojave Desert in California by train with his wife, on 1 November 1955. Further evidence for constructions on the Moon came from the British astronomer Dr H. P. Wilkins, when he reported what looked like a curved ‘arch or bridge’, two miles long, on the Mare Crisium, following its discovery by the American science writer John O’Neill, in 1953. Using a less powerful telescope than Wilkins’s, O’Neill mistakenly assumed it had a span of 12 miles. ‘It looks artificial,’ stated Wilkins on BBC Radio in December 1953. ‘It’s almost incredible that such a thing could have been formed in the first instance (by nature), or if it was formed, could have lasted during the ages in which the moon has been in existence.’

The lunar ‘bridge’ was explained as an illusion caused by the Sun’s rays shining obliquely through a gap between two rocky promontories. Adamski had another, equally unlikely explanation: the bridge, he claimed, was a mile-long mother ship undergoing maintenance. When something goes wrong with one of these gigantic craft, he explained, it is brought down between two mountain tops. If some of the larger machinery needs to be moved, another mother ship straddles the two mountains and is used as a crane to lift the heavy machinery. ‘This will give the appearance of a bridge,’ he said, ‘but as soon as they have repaired the other ship, they both leave, so your so-called bridge has gone.’

On balance, some evidence supports Adamski’s claim that alien bases — if not rivers, lakes, forests and so on — exist on the Moon. Like others, it is a claim that we would be unwise to dismiss out of hand, ridiculous though it seems.

Lieutenant Colonel Philip Corso, US Army (Retired), who served in the Army staff’s Research and Development directorate at the Pentagon in the early 1960s, claims that, in 1961, NASA ‘agreed to co-operate with military planners to work a “second-tier” space program within and covered up by the civilian scientific missions [and] to open up a confidential “back-channel” communications link to military intelligence regarding any hostile activities conducted by the EBEs [extraterrestrial biological entities] against our spacecraft even if those included only shadowing or surveillance’. Corso claims that the US Army and Air Force possessed at least 122 photos taken by astronauts on the Moon ‘that showed some evidence of an alien presence’.

He adds:

An extraterrestrial presence on the moon, whether it was true or not in the 1950s, was an issue of such military importance that it was about to become a subject for National Security Council debate before Admiral Hillenkoetter and Generals Twining and Vandenberg pulled it back under their [UFO] working group’s security classification. The issue never formally reached the National Security Council, although Army R&D [Research and Development] under the new command of General Trudeau in 1958 quickly developed preliminary plans for Horizon, a moon base construction project designed to provide the United States with a military observation presence on the lunar surface . . .

Horizon was supposed to establish defensive fortifications on the moon against a Soviet attempt to use it as a military base, an early-warning surveillance system against a Soviet missile attack, and, most importantly, a surveillance and defense against UFOs. ‘Years later,’ continues Corso, ‘there was even some speculation among Army Intelligence analysts who had been out of the NASA strategy loop that the Apollo moon-landing program was ultimately abandoned because there was no way to protect the astronauts from possible alien threats.’

MEETINGS WITH VIPs Following the success of his books, Adamski became a celebrity. He was invited all over the world to lecture as well as to meet many prominent people. In 1959, he was invited by Queen Juliana of the Netherlands to Soestdijk Palace at The Hague. The meeting, which took place on 18 May, was attended by dignitaries and experts, including Prince Bernhard; Lieutenant-General H. Schaper, Chief of the Royal Netherlands Air Staff; and Professor Jongbloed, an expert in aviation medicine.

After a question from the Queen about one of his trips around the Moon, Adamski was asked some facetious questions by General Schaper and by an astronomer. ‘I have known of no major officials of our Air Force, and few astronomers, who have told what they actually know about the visitors from space,’ he responded. ‘It is a known fact that the secret files and confidential reports of the Air Force have never been released to the public, or even to high officers in the government. I am inclined to believe this applies to all governments.’

Although many questions were asked about the space people, most questions dealt with mankind’s future in space. Going well over its 45-minute allotted time, the meeting lasted two hours. Later, on arrival at the hall where he was to give a lecture, Adamski was besieged by the press and members of the public determined to know what had been discussed at the meeting. ‘This I could not do,’ he said, ‘for the meeting had been on a level of dignity that denied me the privilege of speaking until the Queen spoke first.’31 The press was furious, and most of the newspapers heaped ridicule on the meeting — without knowing what had been discussed. ‘New Scandal in the Court of Holland’ was the banner headline in France, Belgium and Switzerland.

Carol Honey, an aerospace engineer who was Adamski’s right-hand man for seven years, told me that although he did not accept all of the contactee’s claims, he was present on several occasions at Palomar Terraces (Palomar Gardens having been sold in the mid-1950s) when Adamski was visited by various government and military officials.

Adamski also claimed that he was consulted by the Air Force regarding an incident in which one of their jets was three hours overdue. Eventually it came in for an unannounced landing, minus pilot and co-pilot! According to Adamski, the incident took place in Washington on 6 July 1956, and the information came to him in the form of a letter from a base in the Panama Canal Zone. The Air Force wanted to know what had happened.

Adamski replied that he would check with ‘the boys’ (as he later called his space contacts), and two weeks later informed the Air Force that the pilots had been ‘picked up’ by a spacecraft and given the choice of returning to Earth or going with its crew. Apparently, they chose the latter option, because a number of pilots who had been similarly ‘abducted’ in the past and then returned to tell their stories had been mistreated and ridiculed. To show good faith, the ‘boys’ returned the aircraft back to its base under remote control. The Air Force purportedly confirmed it had arrived at a similar conclusion.

In March 1960, Adamski claimed to have received a telegram summoning him to official meetings in New York and Washington. One of these meetings, he related to his coworkers, was with an aide to Dag Hammarskjöld, then Secretary- General of the United Nations, as well as others. ‘In New York,’ he wrote, ‘I had the great honor of dining and visiting for one and a half hours with Dag Hammarskjold’s right-hand man in the UN. Original arrangements had been made for me to meet Mr H. but the African conflict took him away at just that time. But I learned a great deal of interest to us all . . .

During the same period, Adamski had a 15-minute meeting with Senator Margaret Chase-Smith (Maine), Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee for Space Research at the time. ‘I gave her as much information as possible,’ he reported, ‘for which she thanked me. This was an accomplishment that I little expected . . “