The Enterprise Mission

The following is a transcript of the radio interview that was aired late Thursday night - March 21, 1996 - into early Friday morning - March 22, 1996 - on the weeknight program, "Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell". The interview was conducted by Art Bell. The participants were Richard Hoagland and Ken Johnston.

AB: It sure is. And I have with me, Richard C. Hoagland, who was a science advisor to Walter Cronkite, did some work for NASA - and for a long time has been an advocate that there's much more on the moon and Mars, than we've been told.

With him tonight, is Ken Johnston; who was a contractor, taking care of -- actually, he was NASA's data and photo- documentation supervisor, by contract.

In other words, he's the guy who got all the photos. And he's with us. Back in a moment.

AB: Back now to Richard C. Hoagland and Ken Johnston. Ken, you were in the middle of something, so please continue.

KJ: Well, I was just explaining about whether or not - I think you were asking us whether we had seen any unusual features in the pictures?

KJ: And the answer is, yes we did. You have to understand that I had kept these pictures for my own personal self - which were about a thousand pictures, inside of a plastic [album] - where I could flip through them.

Occasionally, someone would show some interest, and I'd flip through them and, you know - good little soldiers, we looked at them and we saw what we were told we were going to see.

But, when Richard and his team came over, and we took a serious look at it, and got out some loops - it was amazing the things that they had seen on some of those eighth to tenth generations that just stood out blatantly right on the pictures that I had.

AB: Alright, a fax: "Please ask Ken" - and I think you just answered it - "if he knew there were artifacts and/or structures or anything anomalous in the photos he possessed, before he met Richard."

KJ: Well, the answer I just gave, is no - I really didn't have a chance to pay that much attention to it. I guess when they came over and we started looking at them, and they started pointing out some of the features - I was taken aback, because here I had them in my possession for - well - eighteen to twenty-some odd years, and really never seriously set out and looked at them.

They were just great pictures of the lunar surface, as well as orbital shots and the astronauts in them. These were men that I'd worked with and knew quite well - when I was one of the consultant test pilots with Grumman on the lunar module.

I never considered that there might be something there that I wasn't told to see.

RH: Art, this is very important, because a lot of people don't understand. They almost say: "Look Hoagland, if you're right, this stuff should be like New York City. Everybody should have seen it. You can't be right, because all of NASA can't be in on the conspiracy. You have to be 'out to lunch'."

And what Ken has just described, is a crucial piece of information and perspective. We tend to see in life, what we expect to see.

RH: And Ken's own experience - which is what I wanted him to relate to the National Press Corps this morning - is of an honest guy, doing a job; that was an eighteen to twenty hours-a-day, demanding, "Chinese-fire-drill" - of getting astronauts to and from the Moon, safely - as rapidly, rapid-fire "bang! bang! bang!" as possible.

Nobody had time, in the system, to look at and question details and photographs, when the official interpreters were telling them: "This is what you're seeing."

And it's that process of expecting to see what you expect to see, which I think accounts for the fact that you only require a tiny handful of people at the top - to manipulate a system.

So, everybody else, as honest as they are, and as hard-working, as motivated as they are - they just don't see it, because it's not blatantly obvious.

It requires an educated eye, to understand how to look at these photographs, to start with.

AB: Alright. Would you please give us a run-down - since the run-down was not given ahead of time - about who was there?

We know that Ken certainly was there. And who else did you have at the press conference, and what kind of reception did they get?

RH: Okay. In addition to Ken, we had Marvin Czarnik, who is an engineer. His experience goes back all the way to the Mercury program and Gemini. He was a key engineer, responsible for the rendevous radar development and implementation of procedures in Gemini - and later on, he helped train the Apollo crews in the development of rendevous techniques.

He was also involved, I believe, in environmental control systems. And basically, his experience was with the astronauts; with the day to day operations; with the engineering; with the process of going to and from the moon.

RH: And he then went to a major aerospace company, McDonnell-Douglas, where he spent a lot of time working with both NASA systems, as well military black-budgeted systems.

RH: And when he heard me at Ohio State a couple of years ago through the Internet, what Marvin did was to set up an independent team called LARG, or Lunar Artifacts Group, in St. Louis.

RH: And he presented the results of their team's five-person independent analysis of our claims - as Ohio State's.

And Ken, you might want to pick-up on some of the things that Marvin said this morning.

KJ: Well, I think it was the independent verification - it is one of the things that he has said he has done all along.

His team would go in and get the same negatives and pictures, and do their own independent research. And then I think it was shortly after that, that he got in touch with you, Richard - after he had checked it out himself.

You know, these are very honest people that wanted to - I guess you might say: "From Missouri. Show me. I want to find out for myself."

And this is good information, Richard, because a lot of people say you're "hanging out on a limb", by yourself - claiming things that just aren't true - with processed photographs that just don't show what you say they show.

RH: Which is crucial, and that is what I have been asking for from the start. Ken mentioned Alex Cook. Alex Cook was there representing, basically - "Mr. Joe Average" - although, I don't think that Alex could be called "average" - would you say, Ken?

KJ: No, not at all. He is certainly just a private individual. He rents his own darkroom.

RH: He represents the best and the brightest of ordinary folk, who are properly motivated. Alex is a young man. He's going to school; going to university up north of Seattle. He's married; has a child, I believe. He attended one of my presentations at the University of Washington, a couple of years ago.

And he saw this data for the first time - in fact I think I did that right after Ohio State. And he was so taken with the photographs that he followed my recommendation. He called up NASA. He started ordering frames on a student's budget. And you remember I told you, Art, that they've now gone up eight-hundred percent in price.

RH: So, this represented a significant investment of student personal resources. When he got the frames back, one of the first things he immediately noticed was what he thought was the absolutely lousy quality of this frame, 4822.

And he called me up, and he was kind of bitching and moaning - and I asked him to look on the photograph to see if this structure we call "The Castle" - this glittering glass thing hanging nine miles above the moon - was present on his version of this frame.

RH: And he admitted - I mean he found it and he was quite excited, because this represented the first confirmation - outside of my Goddard source that had been provided to me initially - that an average person ordering the photograph through NASA could get this frame with this structure.

He then proceeded to send me the original negative, after he made duplicates and prints and all that, and when we got it and compared it to our own data, we then realized that Alex Cook had made a major step forward in the investigation, at that point.

Because, his frame, the "Cook 4822", contained the first stereo pair of "The Castle". An image taken a few minutes later showed it had changed angle and position over the surface, so we can get a 3-D stereo comparison to actually how big it is and how far away it is.

KJ: Oh, absolutely. That was one of the things that the crew did - is that they would take sequenced shots, timed - to give them a stereographic view of objects on the lunar surface.

AB: How can one photograph - I assumed, wrong thing to do, of course - that one photograph would be assigned one number?

KJ: Well, that came as a surprise to me, because when we would be looking for specific views of the surface, as well as where lunar rocks and things were located, even stereo pairs had sequential numbering, back whenever we were getting the original data.

RH: We now have ten different versions of this one crucial frame, and they are all masquerading, Art, under the same frame number!

If I have an "x" amount of dollars in my bank account, and the IRS comes to me and they say: "Wait a minute, Mr. Hoagland, you have "x" dollars times ten".

RH: You know, people can get a little bit pissed off at that - at the federal level.

Well, here we have, for this one frame, ten times the number of images - all masquerading under one frame number and nobody has to be a rocket scientist to realize, "There ain't something right with all that."

AB: Well, alright. In your pre-press release, or press conference press release, you said you were going to have some photographs taken by Russians.

RH: We actually ran out of time at the end and were not able to display those to the group this morning. But we do have two frames now, taken from the Zond-3 mission, which were in the press packets.

We had a lot of material in the press packets that they were able to take away from the conference - some of which we didn't get to, during the actual live presentation. We had hard copy. It was annotated. It had the proper background sourcing, and all that.

We now have a second frame from the Zond-3 mission, on July 20, 1965. And remember - the first Zond frame showed this 30-mile high dome-like protrusion of the lunar limb.

This second frame shows a twenty-some mile "Tower" - very massive tower - which is farther to the north, on the limb of a photograph taken a few seconds earlier. It's in this 28-frame sequence that we can't get our hands on, out of Moscow.

And it is pointed; it is aimed straight down toward the center of the moon. In other words, the Tower is a tower that knows where the local gravity should be pointing it.

KJ: Yes, I did and that was one of the most fascinating things I ever saw, when Richard showed them to me, because clearly - there's a dome on the rim of the lunar surface with the sun coming up behind it - and there's this huge chunk. It literally shows that it has been battered and beat, but it's still pretty much intact.

RH: (laughing) You keep saying that, Art. What's incredible is not the data. What's incredible is the response of our government, and our major media to this data. That's the incredible part. Because - what this is really affirming - is what we're claiming. You're not getting the whole truth here.

KJ: I'd like to interject here. We put together the greatest minds - the brightest, the youngest, and the sharpest - that we could to get to the moon; and right after Apollo 17, we turned around and we started laying everyone off.

Right after Apollo 11, it was no longer research and development. It was routine flights to the moon; and Grumman laid off 30,000 right there. You had Ph.D's selling papers there in Houston.

And basically, once we got there and grabbed the data, and got back - they dismantled the whole system that got us there.

KJ: And basically, once we got there and grabbed the data and got back, they dismantled the whole system that got us there.

AB: That's right. That's right. We went and we've done nothing since, and it's a puzzle to many people.

I suppose you could suggest: "Well, we went to the moon - and this is the conventional wisdom - and didn't find anything, nothing special -- rocks -- that's about it -- and so there was no reason to go back"...

AB: Hmm. So, you had engineers. You had Ken, who was a photo-documentation supervisor with all of the photographs; first generation copies - right, Ken? - coming through you?

KJ: They would be the copies right off the first generation - positive transparencies that were taken.

RH: Now, see - this is a very important piece of information. When NASA sent the Apollo crews to the moon, for some reason - and we have our suspicions - but we don't have a memo describing why there wasn't any negative film sent.

In other words, they didn't send a roll of film - that when you bring it back and you develop it, you get a negative from which you can make the paper prints.

RH: They sent transparency film; reveral film - slide film, really. Ektachrome-X , rated ASA 64, in 1969. And then from those transparencies, something called an inter-negative had to be made.

And from that inter-negative, you'd make your prints - so there was a two-stage process.

So, Ken's prints, actually, were not second generation; they were third generation - from the original data. And in that intermediate step, in that second generation process - is where we believe, that some interesting "hanky-panky" went on. Because...

KJ: That was one of the questions a lot of people asked when they looked at the pictures I had in my collection; - was -

And of course, the explanation I was given at the time was that with all the brightness on the lunar surface and the astronauts' white spacesuits - that you had to step down the focus on the... not the focus, but the ...

KJ: Yes, the f-stop; -- to the point to where it caused the sky and everything to be totally black. Now, that's the story we were given. That's the explanation I gave, up until just recently.

RH: Well, if you take a reversal film, and you expose it - if the moon was as advertised, alright? Even if you stop - if you open the lens wide and you had a time exposure of let's say, several seconds - the sky should still be absolutely black.

There is supposed to be no air on the moon, you know, except for maybe light scattered in the lens, from the surface or the spacesuits - which would cause a kind of a greying-out.

That sky should be beautiful, velvet black; as black as the blackest night you can imagine.

RH: In fact, when you start looking at Ken's prints - which, now remember - are third generation from the originals, taken on the moon - there is a beautiful, very slight, bluish haze in the sky.

You know, looking at it with a bright light - just holding the print at the right angle - and I started to think:

They were - I mean these things have been sitting in archives for 30 years, and they were better, in terms of quality, than the photos we were seeing right out of the lab at NSSDC, just a few months before.

AB: What about the possibility of dust, that had been kicked up by the astronauts?

RH: Well - but dust would not remain suspended. And there was no sources of dust. I mean, you're in a vacuum. You're under 1/6th gravity. The stuff falls down.

Anyway, so, we put these photos under the optical scanner, and used the computer algorithms that we've been working with now for several years.

Because, what the computer is able to do - because it's sensing grey levels and light levels, below the human ability to detect.

RH: It is - the technology is better than the natural human eye. That's what technology does. It amplifies human senses. So, what we're doing, is simply amplifying information that's already there - and making it blatant.

Whereas, if you look at the print, you can barely see that there is something out of place. Now...

RH: But the transparencies - it's my bet that we would have amazing detail in the sky that you could look at, by simply looking at a bright light; that those photographs were exposed to record the glittering glass domes, structures and ruins that are sticking up above the horizon.

That in fact, that was why NASA went with the transparency film; that they had a special film built, which had an ultraviolet-sensitive layer that would record that information even better than conventional Ektachrome-X film.

And that in the laboratory, by putting a filter in the optical enlarger when you made your inter-negative, they could remove almost all trace of that "offending" detail.

So, in essence, they had an almost fool-proof scheme, for taking pictures of real data on the moon, and giving to the American people and the press - and the world - a false, distorted version of the Moon that really is.

RH: We had Australian Television. We had German Television. I did interviews. We were mobbed with cameras. Ken was mobbed with cameras. Alex was mobbed with cameras.

Fox did a very good interview here which ran coast to coast - at various times - on the Fox Network.

I will say this though, on the coverage that Fox gave, the one person that was the rebuttal - a young man - wasn't even born when these pictures were taken. And he's talking that we're "all wet".

We've recorded all the steps that they've done to look at these items and look at these artifacts.

And all they have to do, is just repeat the steps, and answer the question: "Is there something there, or not?"

AB: Alright. Gentlemen, I'll give you an option. I know you're both dog-tired. And I'm sure you feel the way I did after my book-signing. Kind of worn to a frazzle.

As we were building up, I got a lot of faxes and calls from people in your audience, that were basically giving us moral support.

And I think we deserve to answer some of their questions. And while we have Ken, this is a very important opportunity. Ken is feeling a little bit lonely right now.

And one of the things that I think he'd like to do - is to encourage other folks in NASA, who may have done the same thing he did - put data away.

You know - look at it inside [NASA], ask some questions - but don't quite know who to go to, to talk to about this; Ask them to come forward.

Alright, both of you, hold on. We'll be back to you, shortly. You're listening to the CBC Radio Network.

Transcribed by Tom Talley (tomt@nando.net), Proofreading by James Shannon (jamesjs@unixg.ubc.ca), HTML by Keith Rowland (keithr@rowlandnet.com).

Transcript of Interview on the 3/21/96 Art Bell Program of

Richard Hoagland and Ken Johnston

Part 2 of 4 (Second Half-Hour)