The Falsification of History: Our Distorted Reality (71 page)

BOOK: The Falsification of History: Our Distorted Reality
5.06Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub

Finally, of course the above list of facts does not come anywhere close to providing a fully comprehensive list or breakdown of the anomalies surrounding NASA’s claims of Moon missions.
 
To do justice to the full list would be worthy in itself of a book of this size, alone.
 
All I can do is provide a brief overview of some of the less well-known aspects and encourage the reader to undertake his/her own further research on the topic.

Stanley Kubrick - 2001, A Space Oddity
 

I am grateful for all the following information, to Jay Weidner, who amongst his many other talents is a highly skilled photographer.

It has now been 42 years (at the time of writing this) since the first Apollo moon landing. For as many years, there has also been a controversy between those who accept the landings as genuine and those who believe that they were faked.
 
Could what we saw on TV of the alleged missions and landings possibly have been faked by none other than the late, great filmmaker Stanley Kubrick?

In early 1964, Stanley Kubrick had just finished his black satire Dr. Strangelove starring Peter Sellers and was looking to produce a science fiction film as his next big project.
 
Whilst directing Dr. Strangelove, Kubrick had asked the US Air Force for permission to film one of their B52 bombers for the movie, but the Pentagon demurred.
 
The movie, Dr. Strangelove, was about a flight squadron that had been ordered to fly to Russia and drop nuclear bombs on that country and the Pentagon read Kubrick's script and rejected his request to actually film the inside and outside, of a B52.
 
The reason for this rejection was that Kubrick's film was clearly a satire on the military and US nuclear policy and the Pentagon did not wish to be held up to ridicule by Kubrick.

Undaunted by this rejection, Kubrick used various special effects to re-create the B52 in flight.
 
When viewing Dr. Strangelove today, these special effects look dated and old fashioned, but in 1963 they seemed very plausible.
 
Could it be at all possible that someone in high places saw these effects and admiring his creativity, decided to hire him to direct the moon landings charade?

After all, if he could do that well on such a limited budget, what could he achieve on a virtually unlimited budget?
  
No one knows for sure how the powers-that-be convinced Kubrick to direct the Apollo landings footage but it is more than possible that he was compromised in some way.
 
The fact that his brother, Raul Kubrick, was the head of the American Communist Party may have been one of the avenues pursued by the shadow government to get Kubrick to cooperate.
 
But perhaps it was simply the payment of a huge sum of money into a numbered Swiss bank account that swung it for them.

Either way, it would appear that Stanley Kubrick faked the moon landings in return for two things.
 
The first was a virtually unlimited budget to make his ultimate science fiction film: 2001: A Space Odyssey and the second was that he would be able to make any film he wanted, with no oversight from anyone, for the rest of his life.
 
Except for his last film, Eyes Wide Shut, Kubrick got exactly what he demanded.

It is almost uncanny the way that the production of 2001: A Space Odyssey parallels the Apollo programme, in many respects.
 
The film production commenced in 1964 and continued until the film was released in 1968.
 
Meanwhile, the Apollo programme also began in 1964 and culminated with the first Moon landing on the 20th July 1969.
 
Also, it is perhaps significant to note that the scientist Frederick Ordway was working both for NASA and the Apollo programme and was also Kubrick's main science advisor for 2001: A Space Odyssey.
 
Once the deal was negotiated, the work began and the most pressing problem for Kubrick in 1964 was found to be how to work-out a way to make the shots on the ground, on the surface of the moon, look even close to being realistic.
 
He had to make the scenes appear to be open and expansive, just as though the film really had been shot on the Moon and not, as it really was, in a film studio.

Eventually Kubrick settled on doing the entire project with a cinematic technique called Front Screen Projection.
 
It is in the use of this cinematic technique that the ‘trademark’ of Kubrick can be seen all over the NASA Apollo photographic and video material.
 
What is Front Screen Projection?
 
Kubrick did not invent the process but there is no doubt that he played a huge role in perfecting it.
  
Front Screen Projection is a cinematic device that allows scenes to be projected behind the actors so that it appears, in the camera, as if the actors are moving around on the set provided by the Front Screen Projection.

The process became possible when the company 3M invented a material by the name of Scotchlite.
 
This was a screen material that was made up of hundreds of thousands of tiny glass beads each about 0.4 millimetres wide.
 
These beads are highly reflective and in the Front Screen Projection process the Scotchlite screen would be placed at the back of the soundstage.
 
The plane of the camera lens and the Scotchlite screen had to be exactly 90 degrees apart and then a projector would project the scene onto the Scotchlite screen through a mirror and the light would go through a beam splitter, which would pass the light into the camera.
 
An actor would stand in front of the Scotchlite screen and he would appear to be ‘inside’ the projection.
 
Today, Hollywood directors use green screens and computers for special effects, and so Front Screen Projection has gone the way of all obsolete technology.
 
But in its day, especially in the 1960s, nothing worked better than Front Screen Projection for the realistic look that would be needed both for the ape-men scenes in 2001: A Space Odyssey and the faked Apollo landings.

If one watches 2001 on DVD today, it is possible to actually occasionally see the ‘seams’ of the screen behind the gyrating apes.
 
Kubrick was performing Front Screen Projection in such a grandiose fashion that the technicians were forced to sew together many screens of Scotchlite so that Kubrick could create the vastness needed for the ape scenes to be believable.
 

While watching 2001, with the scenes of the ape-men one can see the signatures of Front Screen Projection everywhere.
 
It should be emphasised that the sets that surround the ape-men in the movie are real.
 
There are ‘real’ rocks surrounding the ape-men albeit probably papier mache, but behind the fabricated rocks on the set, the desert scene is being projected via the Front Screen Projector.
 
One of the ways in which one identify that the FSP system is being used is that the bottom horizon line between the actual set and the background Scotchlite screen has to be obscured so that the line remains unseen.
 
Kubrick’s tactic was to strategically locate rocks and other artefacts near the bottom of the scene in order to hide this ‘joint’ line.

Just as a stage magician needs the hidden pockets in his suit to hide the mechanisms of his tricks, so too Kubrick needed to hide the mechanism of his trick behind the carefully placed horizon line between the set and the screen.
 
It is this signature that reveals, not only that NASA did fake the photographs of the Apollo missions but also how they faked them.

NASA photo clearly depicting the fake horizon line

One can see that there is a slight uprising behind the LEM, which is hiding the bottom of the screen.
 
Also notice that even though everything is in focus in the background, there is a strange change in the landscape of the ground immediately above the ‘horizon’ line. This is because the photo of the mountains being used on the FP system has a slightly different ground texture than the set.
 
Indeed, this ‘fingerprint’ is also consistent throughout many of the Apollo images.

However, not all lunar-surface shots use this process.
 
Sometimes the astronauts are just standing on the set with a suspicious, completely black background.
 
The early missions used the Front Screen Projection system only when they had to, but as the missions continued and they had to look more professional, Kubrick began to perfect the process.

Although it is possible to see the Front Screen Projection process on every mission, the seriously revealing images are in the later missions, namely Apollo 14, 15, 16 and 17.

Here are some images from Apollo 17:

That astronaut is driving the lunar rover parallel to the screen and the rover is only three or four feet away from the Scotchlite.
 
Please note how the tyre treads just lead to nowhere.
 
Actually, they are going to the edge of the set.

In the above photo, the astronaut is about six feet in front of the Scotchlite screen.
 
Please also note how everything is in focus from the rocks and pebbles close to the camera all the way to the crystal clear ‘mountain’ behind the astronaut.
 
Another huge impossibility among many impossibilities.

Other books

Kushiel's Mercy by Jacqueline Carey
Vlad by Humphreys, C.C.
Zero Recall by Sara King
Just Friends by Sam Crescent
Milk Glass Moon by Adriana Trigiani
Absolution Creek by Nicole Alexander
Wayward Soldiers by Joshua P. Simon
Spanish Disco by Erica Orloff