Diligent efforts to investigate lunar landings leads to discovery of additional Science Service booklet bearing 1974 date. Antiques collector finds booklet buried in dusty shelves of small Texas town.

by S. Ray DeRusse and Bill Cutler
September 2004 update

Dear Readers;

      It looks like we owe you and even NASA an apology and none too late because it appears they were never going to set the record straight. As the reader may recall, we wrote the opinion piece below in which we questioned the lunar landings beyond the first landing in 1969. We saw the television program in 2002, and read much information on the internet, examined much of the argumentation, but really did not see much to the controversy. I think we were just mystified as to why NASA did not issue an eye catching press conference that would put this matter to rest. It was not until we ran across the science service booklets and saw the copyright dates that something did not look right prompting us to act.
    Since I wrote the opinion piece noting the discrepancy of the copyright dates, Bill Cutler has been on the lookout and embarked on a journey whose principal purpose was to investigate how and with what clues the lunar landing controversy could be resolved. He gathered any piece of evidence he could find during his merchant trips throughout Texas and the surrounding area. In Coleman, a very small Texas town, he came across an antiques proprietorship with a small back room filled with dust, books, and pamphlets. While looking for NASA and Apollo memorabilia he came across a package of Science Service booklets of various flavors (dates). Imagine, to our surprise, when he found a lunar booklet such as the one on NASA's web site and having the exact date of 1974. We were very thrilled and just could not believe it. Equally unbelievable is the lack of initiative assumed by the curators at the JSC for not taking any steps in setting the record straight. Remember that this is the agency who had their star interns walking away with a safe loaded with extra-terrestrial samples. The cloud of suspicion inadvertently created by gaps in the documents could have been lifted, and this was a great opportunity for NASA to gain some credibility with those people who think we never landed on the Moon. They are partially responsible for this error we discovered since the ball was in their court. They read the page below numerous times and did nothing to set the record straight. The main problem is that both the 1970 booklet and the 1974 booklet both have the same cover making them indistinguishable from one another.
      Since you, NASA, have so many scientists doing literally nothing but inventing busy work, i.e. shuffling papers and maintaining data bases at the Johnson Space Center, could they not have informed us of this discrepancy? We were not holding our breath waiting for NASA to issue a correction, based on the culture of scientists whose primary purpose is to look, act and feel busy. Since they did not bother to inform us of this simple error, we surmise that it goes hand in hand with the previous history of scientific misconduct and abuse where someone makes mistakes and is not held accountable. We can say that we want to be held accountable for our mistakes and that sets us apart from "the others". Below are the two booklets, me holding the 1970 booklet and Bill Cutler with an original copy of the 1974 copyrighted booklet seen on the NASA web site. To the non-believers of the lunar landings, we can say that the information we found in the 1974 booklet is slightly more informative than the 1970 booklet.

DONATED MATERIALS CAST FURTHER SUSPICION ON VERACITY OF LUNAR LANDINGS AFTER FIRST LANDING IN 1969.

In the course of working on our lunar sample BCC9601 and in researching the Moon, we occasionally come across material or information that does not make any sense. Now you know that many people believe with a vengeance you are a bad agency, overly funded and out of control, and also think you faked the lunar landings. We do not agree with these people but we do have some questions. In our work we run across lots of paper data (non-internet), and we noticed someone in your charge built a web page which displays several booklets from the SCIENCE SERVICE. These are publications from Nelson Doubleday. Someone on your watch misrepresented information in the 64 page booklet of the Moon. The writer tells us below in the discussion section it was copyrighted in 1974 and that it summarizes the missions up to that date. The book at best could only cover the first and or second missions because it was copyrighted in 1970 not 1974.
At first glance there is not much amiss until you look at the information inside the booklet, and consider all of the circumstances, facts, and evidence in the aggregate and taking into account those who believe the landings never took place.

GALLERY OF SPACE SCIENCE POPULARIZED PUBLICATIONS
SCIENCE SERVICE BOOKLETS : MOON (1974)

    Each book you display on your web page has a discussion section and someone has gone to great lengths in making detailed corrections to each book such as the one above. So why did they intentionally write that this was copyrighted in 1974 instead of 1970? You have gone to too much written corrective detail for this to be a simple error and it was consciously typed in three different places. What happened between 1970 and 1974 that you have to misrepresent the date of copyright and authorship?
    What happened was that we claimed to have 5 more lunar landings in a very short time frame after the first landing, not including the aborted mission. Ordinarily this discrepancy would not make much difference but you know that many people think we never landed on the Moon? This is serious NASA, do you know why? Because this is not a cross hatch mark on a photograph, it is a conscious act of typing on a keyboard in three different places the wrong date. Could it be that in fact we did land on the Moon in 1969 but the remainder of the lunar landings in November 1969, January 1971, July of 1971, April of 1972, and December of 1972 never happened? Or some combination wherein some landings did take place and some did not.
    So many lunar landings in such a short period would have been an overwhelmingly daunting and expensive task wouldn't it? Given the fact that we were spending so much money on "other things" in the 1960's could we have had enough money to land on the Moon that many times?

    The photograph from 1969 above was used on the cover of the Doubleday Booklet. Can you tell us why if you claim this booklet was copyrighted in 1974, newer photographs from the other lunar landings were not used on the cover instead of the 1969 photo? Why in press releases as late as 1980 you still provided press packages with the same 1969 sets rather than newer ones? You didn't run out of film for the later missions did you?
    Can you set our fears and concerns aside by providing us with the following photographs; Conrad and Bean collecting 74.7 lbs. of lunar surface material in November of 1969, Shepard and Mitchell collecting 96 lbs. of material in January of 1971, Scott and Irwin collecting 170 lbs. of material just 6 months later, Duke and Young collecting 213 lbs. of material 8 months later, and finally Cernan and Schmitt collecting around 245 lbs. of lunar material just 8 months after that? Can you provide our visitors with a photograph of these astronauts picking up all or part of this material brought back from the lunar surface during those missions?
    How about doing this, NASA, so we can put these non-believers to rest. Train Hubble on the lunar surface and send back photos of the lunar rover (from Apollo 15). It should be somewhere near the Hadley Rille valley area. OK?

The information contained in the pages scanned below is an insert from the middle of the 64 page booklet. This information could only have come from the lunar samples brought back during the 1969 lunar landing(s) because the document was copyrighted in 1970, not 1974. This is significant in several respects. The information is detailed and appears to be very accurate. More importantly, if we were to make any number of additional missions there after the first landing, which we supposedly did. The information from the first missions is well covered in the book (and printed below) would apply to later missions, because there is not much more to learn from a scientific standpoint beyond what is printed there. The point here is that we were supposed to seek life and life supporting systems which were not found. It makes no sense to make 4 or 5 more trips to the Moon for a batch of rocks that are destined to repeat your original findings.
There is no water or ice or microbial life on or in the Moon, something learned in the first one or two missions, making the rest of the missions unnecessary. It tells us that nothing significantly new was learned from post 1969 missions used to bring back samples, providing a combined motive-opportunity for faking landings after 1969. But what is the real motive?

The motive if there is one...for faking the additional landings can be a mixed bag of reasons and reasoning as claimed by the non-believers. I think Karl G. Harr Jr., president of Aerospace Industries Association put it best in their publication when he celebrated the Apollo accomplishments in the summer of 1979 printed below.

    If a political goal is the motive (assuming everything was learned in the first or second mission) then it certainly is much easier to shoot one long movie with thousands of pictures and split it up into 5 or 6 short films (5 or 6 landings). Sort of like shooting the epics Rich Man Poor Man, and Roots. You have to release it in segments because you're expecting and planning for it to be really long. When one reads the blue pages from the booklet, you can see that in fact if you deduct the recent lunar surface mapping data from the the mid and late 1990's missions, nothing much has been learned about the Moon since the first landing in 1969. In other words, there was about a 20 year period of wasted manpower. People engaging in busy work becoming lunar sample super experts from numerous universities until the mapping data finally arrived 15 or so years later.
    When you consider the fact that there has never been a drop of water or fragment of ice naturally occurring on or in the Moon, that many scientists have endlessly speculated in that direction these papers all over the nation have resulted in lots of press releases containing speculative based work and research. This is a very perplexing situation indeed. I mean, the insert from the 1970 booklet detailing the 1969 mission tells you it is bone dry, "even drier than previously thought" and the samples show that. Why then have we been wasting our time looking for a drop of water or fragment of ice where it is not for decades after 1969?
    Our own lunar sample (BCC9601) shows there has never been any water there. As a matter of fact you have access to this information regading our sample from several sources already including from Texas, California, Spain, and Italy. The crystal chemistry and bulk composition of our sample tells us, there is no chemical similarity that can justify a wholesale theory to sustain a parent-child relationship between the Earth and the Moon. They are from two appreciably different sources with different evolutionary histories and slightly similar but different internal dynamics. And the 1970 booklet data spells this out in plenty of facts and clues that can only be bolstered by the later missions.

    In our research, we see a gradual transformation over time of idealistic scientists who evolve into lunar and planetary science super experts in a very narrow way. Their work product points to a single minded effort spent trying to outdo one another by adopting single minded specialization positions and speculations cloaked as worthwhile theories needing endless funding. Much of this can only be deciphered and explained away, in what amounts to useless scientific papers. And if there is apparent failure, it magically is transformed into another animal to appear to have some partial success in need of further study and funding. This super-synthetic specialization results in partial preparation for the future and demi-god status in stature for the person thus the University, after all, why else is scientific misconduct so rampant yet unaddressed. We have seen it first hand. Some of these people who have become super experts for instance on Mars or the Moon behave as though they are more important and necessary than the planet or satellite they have devoted their life to studying. We can give you many examples but you already know who a few of them are from having read our web pages. It's a bottomless pit with a no accountablity culture, so more is being cultured in University labs everywhere.
    While the science and technology that has sprung from the Apollo program is wonderful and worthy of much of the effort in our view, you have created a culture of scientists who engage in some of the worst cases of conspiratorial conduct and misconduct ever imagined.
    Looking at the big picture, if faking the last couple of lunar landings resulted in world peace and saving millions of lives then it may have been worthwhile. If smoke and mirrors and faking landings on other planets would make the Jews and the Arabs, the Protestants and the Catholics and other groups drop their weapons and live in peace then why haven't we started filming yet? I'm all for it if it will work. But lets be clear and honest about the goals at the outset, as stated above by Karl Harr Jr. With some in your group the words clear and honest are not part of their tool chest so lets spend some money on those kinds of tools. If we do not recieve a response to our request no later than July 25, 2003 then we will have to assume that we are correct and that the first mission was successful and that the subsequent missions were staged as claimed by many non-believers of the lunar landings. No harm done, evidence is evidence.