This post follows up on a conversation I had with our friend Petra at Psyop Detective on her post “Testing skills in propaganda detection and expertise evaluation“, where we went full circle back to a post I had written back in 2023, “Moondoggie Reviewed, where I recounted a 14-post series by Dave McGowan called Wagging the Moondoggie. In summary, it is my contention that McGowan was a hired writer, and a very good one, who was given the material he used to write about serial killers, the Boston Marathon Bombings, the Lincoln Assassination, the music scene of the late-sixties early seventies, and the Moon Landings.
In each of his subjects, I contend, he did a classic limited hangout. His objective, then, would be to take us as far as other researchers had already gotten on these topics, and to act as a gatekeeper, allowing for “This far, no further.” On the rock and roll scene, for instance, he told us that most of the stars of the era (65-75) he wrote about had military connections, in fact, came from military families, and an ungodly number of them had died prematurely. My take after hours and days of research here on the blog was that McGowan was stopping short of the truth, which was that they were not “from” military families, but rather “assigned to” them for hands-on management. So John Denver was not a Duetschendorf, Jim not a Morrison, and Janis not a Joplin. Further, their deaths were, as far as we could see here, faked.
In McGowan’s book Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon, about rock music, he admitted never having interviewed a single person for the book, meaning he had undisclosed sources. It was ironic that the one photograph contained in the book, shown above, of Jim Morrison and his dad, was a fake, a paste-up. Either that, or Jim’s nickname might have been “man-hands Morrison”.
Well, to get to the point, we went round the usual circles, Petra and I, but ended up discussing the missing magnetic telemetry tapes from the Apollo II mission. There were supposed to be 14,000 (metal cannisters) of them, and they supposedly contained the medical data for the astronauts, the telemetry from the spacecrafts performances, and the visual signal from the Moon of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin taking those first steps. Needless to say, these tapes are historically significant, so much so, in fact, that they should have been protected by NASA, and eventually turned over to the National Archives for permanent preservation, allowing access to historians.
I made light of this, poking at Petra a bit by commenting that the tapes had actually been sewn together one-by-one to make the Mylar cover used to shield the Apollo 11 Lunar Lander, and that any left over was glued to the bottom of the Command Module for reentry into the Earth’s atmosphere to protect the astronauts’ asses from being fried alive. But the bottom line is this: They’ve gone missing. One cover story used by NASA was that there was a critical shortage of magnetic tape during the 1970s, so that these tapes were recorded over. However, we now know that shortage did not take place until later, in the 1980s, so the story is bogus.
A person today living on the Moon and looking down on Earth might easily conclude that the tapes never existed, an easy enough conclusion. But according to researcher Randy Walsh, in his book The Apollo Moon Missions, Hiding a Hoax in Plain Sight, Part II, page 187,
Once the Apollo 11 signal was converted for US broadcast, the 14,000 reels of telemetry tape were stored in metal cannisters, placed in boxes and shipped by airfreight to the Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC). After the telemetry tapes were reviewed by GSFC personnel, the telemetry tapes were shipped to the Washington National Records Center (WNRC). It is from the WNRC that the telemetry tapes have mysteriously disappeared sometime within the last few decades or more, but no one really knows for sure, or so we were led to believe.
In Petra’s last comment on the subject, not deliberately “her last” but merely where we left it, she asked “If the moon landings were faked, how would these tapes have existed at all?”. I thought that a very good question, and told her I would answer it here and get back to her. And that brings us to now.
What do we know for sure? For one thing, we know that the tapes do not exist now. According to Walsh, they were over a long period of time checked out of WNRC and not returned, by various NASA personnel, many times anonymously. All that can be said about that is that if the tapes do not exist now, we have no evidence that they ever existed. All we have is NASA’s (self-incriminating) words on the matter.
Above is a photo of “Mission Control” taken during the Apollo 11 flight. I can count at least 50 computer screens and that many men (and one woman) at work. What on Earth are they doing? Given computer technology at the time, and telecommunications ability, I would venture that each was assigned a very small item to track, be it fuel usage or astronaut pulse and respiration. They would not be monitoring radar, as they simply did not have the capability of following a ship 240,000 miles away by that method. There was ongoing chatter between the astronauts and Houston.
One of the questions frequently asked is, if the mission was a hoax, were these people all in on it? I would say, except for the guy front and center with the shit-eating grin, no! The concept to grasp is compartmentalization, that is, each person there only knows what he needs to know. They might indeed be monitoring respiration and fuel usage, but they would know nothing of the location of the astronauts. So these people would not necessarily know anything beyond their limited assignment. Take relief! They are honest and smart, yet isolated and ignorant.
According toe Russian scientists Alexander Popov PhD, Andrei Bulatov, and Dr. Genaddy Ivchenkov, who I wrote about here, the Saturn V used for Apollo 11 was underpowered and could no way have managed Lower Earth Orbit (LEO), and was probably flown that day out over the Atlantic and ditched, no astronauts aboard, of course. They came to these conclusions by analyzing Super 8 film shot by IBM employee Phil Pollacia on the day of the launch. His recording is the only continuous extant visual record of the takeoff of the rocket that day. All others are splices. However, and this is critical, Apollo 11 was under pressure to satisfy JFK’s “before the end of the decade” pledge. Subsequent missions were not so burdened, and might indeed have achieved LEO. To do what? No one is saying.
One thing for sure, they did not go to the Moon.
So what to the missing tapes? I am indeed suspicious that they never existed, or, if they did, contained records of the work of the personnel pictured above, which was necessarily limited. Such a record might easily be torn apart in subsequent years as inadequate, immaterial, or irrelevant. To do away with that problem, NASA ditched the tapes.
But what of the Washington National Records Center (WNRC)? If you’re like me, you’ve never heard of it. Here is its function, according to Wikipedia:
The Washington National Records Center (WNRC) in Suitland, Maryland, stores and references records of U.S. Federal agencies located in the District of Columbia, Maryland, Virginia and West Virginia.[1]
Physical records are transferred to WNRC when they are no longer needed by the respective agencies but have not met their scheduled retention period, including the records of the Federal Courts in DC and the Armed Forces. Those records remain at the WNRC until acceptance as permanent records by the National Archives, or else they are destroyed and recycled. The records are tracked individually in a database from the time they arrive at the WNRC. While court records are freely available to the public, the majority of records are controlled by their respective originating agency, and all records are subject to the access restrictions specific to that agency and national security classification.
That last sentence is a tell, that NASA was the “originating agency”, and so would have been authorized to remove the tapes over time. WNRC would have been charged with recordkeeping, who came and went and checked out what, but apparently, dropped the ball. Many of the tapes checked out were by anonymous sources, such as “NASA, Goddard Space Center” without a name.
Again, we have to step back, perhaps take up residence once more on the Moon, and look at this situation: The greatest scientific achievement of the 20th Century, perhaps in human history, and such a blase’ attitude about it all. NASA and its defenders say, of course, that the information contained on the tapes was also put on paper records. From a history standpoint, those records are only secondary sources, and so are not reliable. The tapes were primary evidence, and they are gone.
We therefore have no telemetric evidence that Apollo 11 went to the Moon.
Piece of Mindful 