Richard Smith

Over 15 years ago the wife of a Hollywood movie producer gave to a friend of mine a short roll of 8 mm movie footage (reddened from age) from the Apollo 10 mission. It wasn’t the official NASA documentary, but a shorter, silent version from an aerospace contractor. As I ran this footage through my projector, I carefully watched for suspicious surface features in the lunar orbital sequences. Eventually there was a scene of the command module on the right side of the frame, shot from the lunar module. Below there was a very large crater that moved from the bottom of the frame to the top over a period of about 10 seconds. In the exact center of this crater there was a group of spherical appearing white objects in a tight cluster, a "central peak" like nothing I had ever seen!

I was very excited over the implications. These objects looked artificial, but I needed a lot more data to build a case. My thoughts were to find the location of the crater and then locate NASA still photography for direct comparison with the film. First, I borrowed the 16 mm Apollo 10 documentary "Green Light For a Lunar Landing" from a NASA regional library. The 8 mm sequence was found in this higher resolution documentary. The white cluster was spectacular, reinforcing the impression of artificiality. Then, eventually, I was able to identify Mare Smythii as the general area. The crater’s unique floor pattern led me to identify it as the recently named Doyle crater at 2 degrees north and 84.5 degrees east (diameter listed by the U.S.G.S. as 32 km). This Mare is at the lunar limb as seen from earth, so observatory photos don’t cover the region except in extreme oblique.

http://www.lpi.usra.edu/research/lunar_orbiter/images/aimg/iv_018_h1.jpg

What can one say by way of analysis of this crucial piece of evidence? The high sun angle on these objects not only works against the "trick of light and shadow" argument, but provides a standard reference for the kind of detail we should be seeing in mapping and panoramic photos from later Apollo missions, but which is often sadly lacking. The central complex appears to span about 1/10 the diameter of Doyle crater, which translates to about two miles across. Keep this scale in mind as we go through the Lunar Orbiter and Apollo still photographs, all of which were taken at high sun angle.

The still photography revealed a disturbing pattern that I will lay out below. Adjusting for scale, one should expect to see in every Lunar Orbiter and Apollo photo at high sun angle the exact same group of white objects, easily seen due to their high albedo. I first went to two NASA/Goddard Apollo 8 photos in my possession. Enlargement of Doyle in both gave the result shown below. Talk about a photo that speaks for itself! Lunar Orbiters were obtaining resolutions on the order of several feet when their orbits were at a perigee of about 30 miles. This photo can’t resolve on a scale of a mile! I next went to an Apollo 10 Hasselblad that is also shown below. Obviously also taken at high sun angle, the mushy central complex displays an albedo that directly contradicts the previous Apollo 8 photo.

There is an entire tale to tell with regard to the Lunar Orbiter IV photo I examined. An enlargement of Doyle’s central region in a print of 18H1 ordered from NASA/Goddard in recent years is radically different from the film. But that is only half the story. The exact same enlargement of an 18H1 print taken from the 35 mm microfilm negative (Lunar Orbiter IV roll archived in 1968) shows a completely different pattern! Since NASA labels both images as 18H1, I can’t emphasize enough that the two should be identical in terms of features, with the Goddard print obviously somewhat sharper than the microfilm version. We are left with the conclusion that the original 18H1 was doctored two different ways, with the central complex radically altered in the later version and completely obliterated in the earlier.

However, there is more to photo 18H1. To the northeast of Doyle there is a small "crater" with a white ejecta blanket. Again, in an enlargement of this feature, one would expect to see exactly same thing in both photos, with the recent Goddard print somewhat sharper than the microfilm version. Incredibly, the "crater" shadow is elongated in different directions, with the Goddard print showing a north/south direction and the microfilm version an east/west direction! Which leads one to suspect that this isn’t a crater at all, but another beautiful, white, spherical installation (see my "Targets of Opportunity" article for a similar pattern of deception at the base of Promontory Agarum).

If there is one photo in the NASA archives that should show Doyle crater in exquisite detail, it would be an Apollo panoramic shot. I was able to locate an Apollo 15 pan photo covering Doyle on my panoramic 35 mm microfilm reel. A professionally produced 8 x 10 print from the negative microfilm and further enlargement resulted in what one can only describe as a painting of this crater. The central complex was altered to look like irregular hills. Also, the entire crater is much too dark. Since I had found the microfilm images to be excellent representations of the actual 5" x 48" panoramic prints, I felt certain that ordering the latter of AS15-PAN-9113 would be a waste of time and money.

Although images from the web often aren’t detailed enough for definitive analysis, they still can provide some useful information. I recently found four color Hasselblads from Apollo 16 and 17. One of these is shown here. Although this one seems to at least have the color correct, that’s about it for accuracy. Again, the central complex is different and appears quite similar to the version in Lunar Orbiter 18H1. Also, what I call the large white "superdome" just inside the crater rim in the two o’clock position is almost completely gone!

Strangely, although severely degraded, the photo that comes closest to what is shown in the film is a Clementine shot (designated lub3634j). The objects in question retain their high albedo.

At this point it should be clear that, although Doyle crater was extensively photographed by several NASA missions from essentially vertical positions, we have yet to see even one still photo that shows Doyle as it actually is. The Apollo 10 movie footage provides a direct yardstick to measure the extent of NASA’s data suppression. Through this film we are given a window into the true nature of the lunar surface.

My final investigation into Doyle crater was an attempt to obtain a video transfer from the 16 mm Apollo 10 documentary "Green Light For a Lunar Landing." In one clean 16 mm print I had examined years ago, Doyle was magnificent! Perhaps high quality video would capture most of the resolution and contrast of the film. A video technician friend of mine expected a betacam transfer to contain about 80% of the film version details. I requested a video catalog from the Johnson Space Center. JSC will loan their videos to organizations free of charge. Your organization can borrow the video and then make a transfer to DVD (they encourage this!).

Just one possible problem remained. Did NASA edit out the sequence showing Doyle crater when the film transfer to video was made? In the catalog, the Apollo 10 documentary had a new name, "To Sort Out the Unknowns." When the video arrived, a friend made a DVD copy at the time we showed the documentary at our organization event. I quickly found the Doyle crater sequence. JSC documentation places it on file roll no. 0474 (for a NASA "insider" who would like a peek at the original 16 mm film). Although the sequence remains, it is so lacking in clarity and contrast compared to both the 8 and 16 mm film versions that I find it difficult to believe the video hasn’t been deliberately degraded.

So, there you have it - numerous examples of what should be an accurate photo library of Doyle crater in Mare Smythii, spacecraft shots of some very large and highly geometric white objects.

This discovery, however, doesn’t stand alone. In 1988 I spent a couple of hours with the late Fred Steckling, author of Alien Bases on the Moon. While there, I viewed many of the NASA photographs he used in compiling his book. While showing him the Doyle crater evidence, he showed me a film frame of a different crater (it also contained the familiar reddish tint of aged film stock and also may have been Apollo 10 footage). Along the inside crater slope below the rim were seven or eight white objects, described by Fred as looking like "chicken eggs," lined up together instead of grouped in a cluster. As I recall, this photo was included in his book, but the white "eggs" were lost in the printing process.

For the record, although I don’t endorse his claims of clouds and lakes on the moon (he humbly admitted to me that he had made mistakes), there is an "untold story" behind some of what Fred Steckling found - a story that will be told when the world is willing to listen, especially other lunar researchers.

LOWER ARROW POINTS TO CLUSTER OF ENORMOUS WHITE OBJECTS IN CENTER OF DOYLE CRATER. TWO ARROWS IN UPPER RIGHT POINT TO OTHER WHITE OBJECTS, ONE ON THE CRATER RIM AND THE OTHER OF EVEN GREATER SIZE (ENLARGEMENT FROM 8 MM FILM FRAME).