WE CHOOSE TO GO - The Questions About Space Exploration We Were Never Allowed to Ask

🚀 EPISODE 10 — "We Choose to Go" — THE SPACE SERIES FINALE 🚀

In 1962, the U.S. military fired nuclear weapons at the sky. They called the operation Fishbowl. Several tests failed mid-flight. After 1962, we never tried again. One year later, Kennedy promised the moon.

Tonight, the biggest question this series has been building toward: Did we really go to the moon?

Across 140 minutes, I lay out the case — Apollo 1, the Van Allen radiation belts, the astronauts who don't act like heroes, the deliberately erased original tapes, the technology a current NASA astronaut says "we destroyed," the 6.2 million gallon pool in Houston where they practice "spacewalks," the Hollywood Artemis 2 rollout, the T-minus mystery (NASA = SATAN minus T), and a single Bible verse on Wernher von Braun's gravestone that should stop you cold.

I'm not telling you what to believe. I'm laying out what's documented and asking where YOU stand.

This is the end of the Space Series. Episodes 7 through 10. Operation Paperclip. Walt Disney. Jack Parsons. And now Apollo.

I'm Elizabeth Stanton. Thanks for killing time with me.

📧 JustKillingTimePodcast@gmail.com 📍 Recorded in Derby, Kansas 🎙️ Listen everywhere podcasts are found

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:17

I want to start tonight with a secret. A secret that was classified for 60 years. A secret about nuclear weapons and the sky above us, and what happens when a government decides to find out for itself whether everything you've been told about the world is true. The year is 1962. One year before President Kennedy stands in front of 35,000 people at Rice University and tells America we are going to the moon. One year before that famous speech that launches the entire Apollo program, one year before we promised the world we will send human beings 238,855 miles through space to another world. In that year, the United States military runs a series of nuclear tests unlike anything attempted before or since. They aren't testing nuclear weapons against Soviets, they aren't testing them against China, they are testing them against any earthly enemy at all. They aim them at the sky, and the code name they pick for the operation, and I'm not making this one up, it's Operation Fish Bowl. So think about it. It's fish swimming in a bowl, looking up at a glass dome that contains their world. High altitude nuclear detonation, some at altitudes over 400 kilometers above the Earth, higher than where the International Space Station orbits today. The official explanation was that they were testing the effects of nuclear weapons in space, studying electromagnetic pulse, preparing for missile defense. But look at what they named the individual tests. Bluegill, Starfish, Eureka, Fishbowl. Every single name is a creature that lives under something, under water, under a dome, under a barrier separating it from whatever's above. In several of those tests, they failed. Bluegill Triple Prime exploded seven seconds after launch. Starfish detonated below its target altitude, and Eurica never reached the height it was supposed to reach. It was almost if, as if something stopped them, as if they hit something solid. And that is the conspiracy theory. And one year later, September 12, 1962, Kennedy promised we're gonna go to the moon. What if those nuclear weapons weren't testing space technology? What if they were testing space itself? What if the United States government needed to know whether there was really something solid above us? Before they promised the American people we could travel beyond it. So in night, sorry, July 20th, 1969, Neil Armstrong steps off of a ladder onto what NASA tells us is the surface of the moon. Half a billion people watch on television. It is to this day the most watched live broadcast in the history of human civilization. But what if they watch something that was the greatest piece of theater ever staged? What if the rockets were built by Nazi war criminals with falsified war records, like we covered several weeks ago? What if there's a 6.2 million gallon pool in Houston where they practice their spacewalks? And what if the astronauts who came back don't act like men who accomplished the most extraordinary thing any human being has ever done? What if we never went to the moon? Because we couldn't break through what was above? And what if the agency that told us we did had a name that in Hebrew sounds remarkably like the word deceive? Welcome to episode 10 of Just Killing Time. I'm your host, Elizabeth Stanton, and this is the finale of our space series. Tonight we're going to ask the biggest question this entire series has been building toward. Did we go to the moon? Or did we convince half a billion people we did after we couldn't break through with nuclear weapons? I'm not going to answer that for you. Nobody can. But by the end of tonight, you'll have everything I have, and then you get to decide. So let's pour your coffee, lock the doors, cancel your plans because we're going to go all the way to the top, or we're going to find out why we couldn't. You're listening to Just Killing Time, a true crime conspiracy, and the stories that keep us up at night. We are now four episodes into this series, and we've covered the Nazi war criminal who built the rockets, the FBI informant who sold the dream on Walt Disney's primetime television, the occultist who founded the JPL on Halloween night in a canyon he believed was a portal to hell. Tonight, nuclear weapons fired at the sky in 1962, and astronauts who died asking questions about Apollo before it even flew. The astronauts who came back and didn't act like heroes, and the technology we destroyed, the tapes we erased, the patterns nobody talks about, and at the very end, a single Bible verse on a gravestone in Alexandria, Virginia, that the man who built the moon rocket chose for himself. Let's find out what we can find out and let's let you decide the rest. So before we talk about the astronauts who supposedly walked on the moon, I need to tell you about an astronaut who died before he could even get there. Virgil Ivan Grissom. Everybody called him Gus. He was the second American in space. He was the command pilot of the first crewed Gemini mission, one of the original Mercury 7 astronauts selected by NASA in 1959. By 1967, Gus Grissom had had more spaceflight experience than Neil Armstrong, more than Buzz Aldrin, and more than anybody else on the Apollo roster, and he was scheduled to command Apollo 1, the first crewed Apollo mission. And in the months before that mission was supposed to fly, he had started asking very loud, very public questions about whether the Apollo spacecraft could actually keep human beings alive. In late 1966, his concerns about the command module had escalated to the point where he was saying things on record like this. This is Gus. Gus said, this new spacecraft is a lemon. If we die, we want people to accept it. We're in a risky business, and we hope that if anything happens to us, it will not delay the program. The conquest of space is worth the risk of life. So he said, the Apollo spacecraft is a lemon. That's the kind of thing you say when you stop being polite. That's not a man who thinks the program is fine. He also reportedly took a little, a literal lemon and hung it on the simulator at the Apollo training facility to make sure his complaint about the vehicle was visible to everyone walking past it. He was scheduled to testify before Congress in February of 1967 about Apollo safety problems, and he never made that hearing. Friday evening, Kennedy Space Center, Florida, launch complex 34. It is July 27th, 1967. The Apollo 1 command module is sitting on top of a Saturn 1B rocket. But this is not launch day. This is a quote-unquote plugs out test, a routine rehearsal where the spacecraft runs on its own internal power. It's sealed with the crew inside going through the launch procedures step by step. So there's no fuel in the rocket, no real danger anticipated. Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee climbed into the command module at one o'clock in the afternoon. They were going to be in there for hours. And at 6.31, after more than five hours of testing, Ed White reported a communications problem. Four seconds later, an electrical short circuit sparked a fire inside the cabin. And the cabin was pressurized with pure oxygen at 16.7 pounds per square inch. That's higher than the atmospheric pressure outside. And in pure oxygen, at high pressure, things burn fast. Things burn hot. Things burn in ways that air doesn't allow. And the fire, it spread instantly. Seventeen seconds after the fire started, the command module ruptured from internal pressure. All three astronauts died. Not from the fire itself, but from smoke inhalation. They suffocated in less than 30 seconds. Here's what you should ask when you ask questions about this particular fire. The Apollo first hatch, the Apollo 1 hatch, opened inward into the spacecraft, and it was held closed by 12 latches. It required a special tool to open and under perfect conditions. It took 90 seconds minimum to get it open. So when that fire started, the cabin pressure spiked rapidly, and the higher internal pressure pushed the latch even more tightly closed against its seal, which made it physically impossible to open from inside the spacecraft. Outside the capsule, the ground crew couldn't reach the astronauts for over five minutes because of the smoke and the heat. By the time they got the hatch open, all three men had been dead for minutes. So NASA knew the hatch design was dangerous. They had discussed it in safety briefings and meetings, and they had considered switching to an outward opening hatch, the kind that could be pulled in seconds in an emergency. And they went with the inward opening hatch design, anyways. Their reasoning, as documented, was that a fire inside the cabin was unlikely. Three astronauts died because of that calculation. The same three astronauts who were scheduled to be the very first crew to test whether Apollo could actually keep human beings alive in space. So the Apollo 1 investigation took nearly two years. NASA made hundreds of design changes to the command module. They made a new hatch, new cabin atmosphere, mixing nitrogen with the oxygen. Thousands of components were replaced, electrical systems were redesigned. They never also got to hear Gus Grissom's testimony to Congress about Apollos' safety. They never heard his detailed concerns, and they never got the benefit of his experience. And remember, he had more spaceflight hours and experience than anybody else had. Not telling you Gus Grissom was murdered to silence his criticism of the Apollo program. I want to be very clear about that. Accidents happen, especially in test programs. Spacecraft are dangerous, and people die in the space program. That's not new. But it's worth at least noticing that the most experienced astronaut in the program, the one calling Apollo a lemon, the one scheduled to testify to Congress about safety problems three weeks later, died in a preventable fire because of a hatch design NASA knew was problematic. And after his death, the Apollo program continued with a roster of less experienced astronauts who were less likely to make a public scene about whether the technology actually worked. In 1958, the same year NASA was founded, the Explorer 1 satellite, America's first satellite, discovered something in space in a more cautious world, probably should have ended any dream of human space travel before it really even got started. Radiation belts. The two donut-shaped zones of intense radiation surrounding the Earth like invisible armor. They were named after the physicist who interpreted the Explorer 1 data, a guy named James Van Allen. The inner belt sits roughly between 1,000 and 12,000 kilometers above Earth, and the outer belt stretches from about 13,000 to 60,000 kilometers. They are filled with high-energy protons and electrons trapped by Earth's magnetic fields. According to NASA Van Allen probe mission data from John Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, they said the inner belt primarily consists of those high-energy protons and electrons which can reach astonishing energies. Millions of electron volts. So millions of electron volts. We're talking about energy levels equivalent to temperatures of tens of thousands of degrees. And every single Apollo mission had to fly through both of those radiation belts, going to the moon and then coming back from the moon in aluminum spacecraft with hole walls thinner than the door of your kitchen refrigerator. So skip ahead. We're going to go to 2001. They published a report on astronaut radiation exposure during long-duration space missions. And buried inside that report was an analysis of Apollo radiation exposure that should have made front page news. It didn't. Surprisingly, no Apollo astronaut showed any ill effects after radiation exposure. So 1.8 sieverts of radiation exposure associated with 20% mortality, and no Apollo astronaut showed any ill effects. Which means the government's own medical experts, not flat earthers, not conspiracy theorists, the actual Institute of Medicine calculated that one in five Apollo astronauts should have died from radiation exposure. Now let's look at the actual roster. Apollo 11, Armstrong, Aldrin, Collins, fine. Apollo 12, Conrad, Bean, Gordon, all fine. Apollo 14, we have Shepard, Mitchell, Rusa, all fine. Apollo 15, 16, 17, all fine. Twelve men flew through those belts. 20% mortality predicted, zero deaths, zero illnesses, and zero radiation symptoms, not even mild nausea. The Institute of Medicine offered exactly two explanations for this. Option one, the radiation models were just wrong and the actual dose was much lower than calculated. Or option two, and I'm quoting the report here. Underreporting of health hazards. That's it. Either the radiation science was wrong or somebody under-reported how sick the astronauts actually got. Those are the only two ways to make the numbers make sense, and neither one is really very comforting, is it? And here's what I find interesting. When NASA talks about Apollo missions, missions that they say happened over 50 years ago, radiation was apparently never really a problem. Manageable, routine, it was no big deal. And when NASA talks to Congress about future missions, though, missions they need funding for, the language about radiation gets very different. According to NASA Science Documentation on Artemis I mission objectives for 2022, since the Moon is more accessible to us than Mars, scientists can use it to gain important scientific knowledge about the effects of the harsh conditions of deep space living on the living systems. Artemis I's mission was an important step towards understanding the impacts to life beyond the Van Allen belts by flying model organisms around the moon and back. Artemis I, the year is 2022. So 2022. NASA is, in their own words, still training to understand the effects of deep space radiation on living organisms. And they flew mice and yeast around the moon to study it. So in 1969, we sent Neil Armstrong through the Van Allen belts in a tin can with computing power weaker than a pocket calculator, and the man came home just fine. In 2022, NASA flew laboratory mice around the moon to find out whether deep space radiation is safe for living things. So either radiation was never actually a problem in 1969, or Neil Armstrong was tougher than mice. One of those things is easier to bleep than the other. August 12th, 1969, the manned spacecraft center in Houston, Texas, three weeks and two days after Apollo 11 splashed down. Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins sit behind a table in a sterile, windowless room, and they're about to give their first public interview since becoming supposedly the most famous human beings on Earth, since accomplishing the most extraordinary thing any person has ever done, since walking on another world. Half a billion people had watched them land. The president had called them. Ticker tape parades were in the works. They were about to be the most celebrated humans alive. And they look like three men who would rather be literally anywhere else. So watch Neil Armstrong. He stares at the table, his hands are clenched into fists, his shoulders are super duper tight. And when he speaks, his answers are short and mumbled. And when he looks up at all, his eyes dart around the room like he's looking for a way out. This is a test pilot. A man who has flown experimental aircraft at Mach 6. A man specifically selected for the most dangerous mission in human history because of his composure under pressure. He can't make eye contact with reporters who are asking him about the greatest achievement of his life. Watch Buzz Aldrin. He looks exhausted, defensive, like he's about to break down. His answers ramble and they contradict themselves. At several points, he loses track of what he's saying mid-sentence. Watch Michael Collins. Collins is the only one who looks normal. He's relaxed, he's confident, he's smiling, he's making eye contact, he's giving full and coherent answers. And Michael Collins is the one who didn't go down to the surface. He stayed in lunar orbit. The man who didn't walk on the moon is the only one who looks comfortable talking about it. I've watched this press conference dozens of times now. I've shown clips to people without telling them what to look for. Almost everybody comes back with the same observation. These men don't look like heroes. They look like people who are scared of something. You can train someone to say the right words. It is a lot harder to train them to look comfortable though, saying it. And that's all I'm pointing out. So 26 minutes into the press conference, a reporter asks Neil Armstrong what should be the easiest question of his life? Here's the question. Neil, when you were carrying out that incredible moon walk, did you find that the surface was equally firm everywhere, or were there harder and softer spots that you could detect? And secondly, when you look up at the black sky, could you actually see the stars in the solar corona in spite of the glare? The reporter is asking what the stars look like from the surface of the moon. Neil Armstrong has just spent two and a half hours on another world. The most extraordinary astronomical observation platform any human being has ever stood on. So just think about it. You know, the moon has no atmosphere to blur his vision, no light pollution from cities. It's a perfect view of the universe from the surface of another celestial body. And Neil Armstrong does not answer the question. He stares at the table and he mumbles something about the firmness of the surface. He skips the star part entirely. So follows Aldred. He leans over and he answers for him. And Buzz Aldred's response was, I don't recall during the EVA period ever looking up and seeing stars. That blew my mind away. He says, I don't recall ever looking up and seeing stars. You just spent two and a half hours walking on the surface of the moon and you don't recall looking up? I mean, I have relatives who have given more enthusiastic descriptions of their weekend trips to Branson, Missouri. Neil Armstrong supposedly did the most extraordinary thing any human being has ever done. And when somebody asks him about the view, he can't think of anything to say. And that's not how people talk about the trip of a lifetime. That's not how people talk when they're trying to say something. That's well, that is how they talk. When they're trying not to say something that they shouldn't. After that press conference, Neil Armstrong essentially disappeared from public life for 40 years, four decades. The most famous man on earth, he became a recluse. And here's what's really strange. Armstrong was not a shy person. He was a test pilot, a university professor, a corporate board member. He testified before Congress about aviation policy. He consulted for aerospace companies, and he gave plenty of speeches about plenty of things. Just not about the moon. Forty years of declining interviews about Apollo. And in 1994, 25 years after Apollo 11, he gave a rare speech at Ohio State University. The speech was mostly about aviation and engineering, but buried in the middle of it was one sentence that I genuinely cannot stop thinking about. Here's what Neil said. There are great ideas undiscovered, breakthroughs available to those who can remove one of truth's protective layers. That's not a sentence you say casually. That's a sentence you craft when you want to say something without actually saying it. That is a sentence you reach for when you know you can't say something. So Neil Armstrong, he spent 40 years not talking about the most important thing he was supposedly known for. And when he finally said something publicly about truth, he said something about its protective layers. That's not how heroes behave. That's not how people behave when they're that's how people behave when they're carrying something that they just can't put down. I mean, think about it. If you had walked on the moon and you were the most famous person in the entire world with the most extraordinary adventure of a lifetime that so very few people were ever going to ever experience, would you shut up about it? So Buzz, Buzz Aldrin, he handled his post-Apollo life very differently from Armstrong. Where Armstrong went silent, Aldrin kept showing up. Public appearances, interviews, talk shows. He really never stopped talking about Apollo. But what some of what people have said over the years should make you a little uncomfortable. So the year is 2000, and he goes on to Conan O'Brien. It's a friendly interview, no aggressive questioning, just a late night talk show. And Conan, he mentions watching the moon landing as a kid and how his parents had woken him up to see history being made. So this is friendly dialogue and just reminiscing. Buzz Aldrin's response was not what anyone expected. Here's what Buzz Aldrin said to Conan and O'Brien. He said, No, you didn't. There wasn't any television. There wasn't anyone taking a picture. You watched animation, so you associated what you saw with, you know, how many feet were going to the left and right, and then I said, contact light, engine stopped, and a few other things. And then Neil said, Houston, Tranquility Base, the Eagle has landed. You watched animation. Conan and Brian just sat there for a second, not knowing what to do with that. Now, fact checkers have pointed out that Aldrin was talking about the descent itself, not the moonwalk. The descent was animated for TV broadcast because there was no cameras filming the lander as it came down. So that's technically accurate context. But listen to how he says it. No softening, no explanation, just you watched animation. That's not how you deliver a friendly clarification about television production. That's the way you say something you can't quite say directly. So 2015. It's the National Book Festival, Washington, D.C. Buzz Aldrin being interviewed by an eight-year-old girl named Zoe. It's a totally sweet setup. This elderly astronaut talking to a curious child about space. It's wholesome, and the little girl asks what seems like a perfectly innocent question. Here's Zoe's question. Why has nobody been to the moon in such a long time? It's a reasonable question, by the way. Twelve people walked on the moon between 1969 and 1972. Then nothing for more than 50 years. Why? Buried in the middle of Aldrin's rambling, uncomfortable answer was this. Buzz said, That's not an eight-year-old's question. That's my question. I want to know, but I think I know. Because we didn't go there, and that's the way it happened. Because we didn't go there, and that's the way it happened. The friendly fact checker reading of this clip is that Aldrin was talking about funding cuts and political will, and that we never went back in the larger sense because the country lost interest. And in context, you can hear him kind of trying to clarify after he says it, but listen to the first thing that comes out of his mouth. I think I know because we didn't go there. That's not a man explaining the federal budget. That's a man saying something true and then catching himself. So furthermore, September 9th, 2002, Beverly Hills, California. Buzz Aldred is now 72 years old, and he thinks he's been invited to a Japanese television children's interview. What he actually walks into is a confrontation by a filmmaker named Bart Sebrel. Now, Sebrel has spent years investigating the moon landing conspiracy theories, and he approaches Aldrin with a Bible, and he demands that Aldrin swear on it that he walked on the moon. Buzz Aldrin, 72 years old, a decorated military officer, supposedly the second human being in history to walk on the surface of the moon. He punches Bart Sebrel right in the face on camera, in front of witnesses, in a hotel parking lot, and the Beverly Hills police decide they decided and declined to press charges. Think about the range of like possible reactions when a stranger asks you to swear on a Bible that you did something you've already told the world that you did. You could laugh, you could walk away, you could call security, you could put your hand on the Bible if it's true. I mean, where's the word in that, right? Or you could just punch a stranger in the face at 72 years old. So the response of the man, it sounds like he was kind of cornered, and so he just gave him a whack, I guess. Um but that's what happened. July 20th, 1969, as Armstrong and Aldrin descended towards the lunar surface, every piece of data from Apollo 11 was being recorded onto magnetic tape. Not just audio, telemetry, spacecraft systems data, life support readings, navigation, communications, everything. So it's high quality, original recordings of the most important moment in human history. Data future engineers could use to study exactly how Apollo worked, information that would be invaluable for any future moon mission. It's irreplaceable scientific and historical documentation. And NASA lost it. Not lost exactly. Recorded over, erased, and they reused that same magnetic tape for other missions. According to NASA's admission recording the lost Apollo 11 original tapes, they said the original slow scan television footage was accidentally recorded over and lost. NASA routinely recorded over mission tapes to reuse them for later missions, and the original Apollo 11 moonwalk footage was among the casualties. That blows my mind. What do you mean with the billions and billions of dollars budget? They are routinely recording over mission tapes. So that Apollo 11 moonwalk footage was one of those casualties. They treated the original recording of the first moon landing the way an office would treat an old voicemail. Like used the tapes, erased them, and recorded new material over the old. Just standard operating procedure, I guess. I just I it blows my mind, like I said, we accomplished the most extraordinary technological feat in human history. We sent human beings to another world and brought them home alive, and then we erased the original recordings of all of it to save money on magnetic tape. I I don't know. Either NASA in the 70s had zero understanding of historical preservation, um, or they were not particularly concerned about preserving evidence of something that they didn't need preserved of. I'm just laying there's two options out, I guess. In 2006, NASA actually launched a series, organized three-year search for the original Apollo 11 tapes, and they checked all the archives. They contacted the contractors, they went through storage facilities all over the country. And here's what NASA's statement said. After a three-year search, NASA has concluded that the original Apollo 11 slow scan television tapes are lost forever. The agency believes the tapes were likely degaussed and reused for other missions in the late 1970s or the early 1980s. Lost forever. The original recordings of humanity's greatest achievement. Just go on. But it gets worse. NASA says the footage wasn't accidentally lost, it was deliberately destroyed, degaused. This magnetic signal completely erased using powerful magnetic fields, not accidentally recorded over, intentionally wiped. So we can find 3,000-year-old pottery fragments and reconstruct ancient civilizations from them. We have film footage of the Wright brothers, their first flight from 1903, and we have audio recordings of the Civil War era Edison wax cylinders. But the original recordings of the Apollo 11 moon landing, the most watched human event in history, was deliberately destroyed to reuse magnetic tape. That's not preservation, that's evidence destruction. Or depending on how you read the situation, a perfectly defensible administration oversight at a budget-strapped agency in 1979. And you get to decide that. So they created from broadcast television recordings, not from the original tapes, and then they enhanced it, meaning they processed it, they modified it, cleaned it up using computers. So what you see when you watch Apollo 11 footage is a computer-enhanced version of a television broadcast of a recording that no longer exists. The footage of the most watched human history moment in human history has been digitally processed. And how do you forensically verify the authenticity of footage that has been computer enhanced? How do you study the original data when the original data was deliberately destroyed? You can't. Which, depending on your interpretive frame, is either a failure of historical preservation or it was exactly the point. By December 1972, the Apollo program had accomplished on paper everything it set out to do. Six successful moon landings, 12 astronauts walking on the lunar surface, 382 kilograms of moon rocks brought back to Earth, mission after mission, all of them completing their objectives. Apollo 11, Apollo 12, Apollo 14, 15, 16, 17, landing, sample collection, return. Apollo 13 had its famous near disaster, but it came home with the crew alive. We had by all accounts mastered traveling to the moon. We had solved every technical challenge and we had proved human beings could survive the journey. And then we just stopped. Apollo 18 was scheduled for July 1973. Apollo 19 was scheduled for December of 73. And Apollo 20 was scheduled for July 1974. All three were canceled, not delayed, not postponed, cancelled. The rockets had already been built, the lunar modules already manufactured, the astronauts trained, everything was sitting there ready to go. Apollo 18's hardware got reassigned to Skylab. Apollo 19s went to the Apollo Soyuz joint mission with the Soviets, and Apollo 20's hardware got put into museums. We built rockets capable of taking humans to another world, and we turned them into museum exhibits. So NASA's official reason for ending Apollo is on its face straightforward. It was budget cuts, shifting political priorities, and the public, they had moved on. The Vietnam War was eating the federal budget, and Nixon wanted to fund the Space Shuttle instead. So NASA's historical analysis of Apollo program termination, they said this. The decline in public and political support for the Apollo program was evident by the late 1960s. The costs were enormous, and many felt that the primary objective of beating the Soviet Union to the moon had been accomplished. That explanation, it makes political sense. It's not crazy. But I sit with what we're actually being asked to believe here. We spent a decade and $25 billion in 1970s dollars learning how to go to the moon. We mastered the technology, we proved it worked, we had the infrastructure, we had trained crews ready, and then we threw all of it away because we'd beaten the Russians. That's like climbing Mount Everest and immediately forgetting how to climb mountains. Either Americans had no interest at all in the greatest exploration capability in human history, or there was a different reason for stopping that nobody put in writing. And here's the part that when you actually look at it makes the Apollo cancellation harder to explain. The Soviet Union didn't stop trying to reach the moon when Apollo succeeded. They kept going. Luna 15 actually crashed on the moon during Apollo 11. Luna 16 successfully returned lunar samples in September of 1970. Luna 17 landed a rover in November of 1970, and Luna 20, 21, 22, 23, and 24, Soviet missions kept running through 1976. The Soviets were still actively exploring the moon for four years after we supposedly stopped. If the moon was just a Cold War prize, why did the Soviets keep going after they'd already lost that prize? And if the moon had real scientific value, why did we stop after we'd won? The safe The Soviets, they behave like the moon was worth continued exploration. We behave like the moon was a political stunt we could just walk away from once we proved our point. Either way, it's just interesting that we had different reasons for being there in the first place. Now, Don Pettit had been to space three times. He had spent 370 days on the International Space Station. He holds multiple patents. He has a PhD in chemical engineering, and he's been with NASA for over 20 years. Don Pettit is not a conspiracy theorist. He is a current active NASA astronaut, and he's a guy NASA puts in front of cameras. And when he asked why NASA didn't go back to the moon using the same technology that supposedly got us there in 1969, Don Pettit said something that I think genuinely think most people miss. He said, I go to the moon in a nanosecond. The problem is we don't have the technology to do that anymore. We used to, but we've destroyed that technology and it's a painful process to build it back again. So he said we destroyed that technology, and it's a painful process to build it back again. And that blows my mind. The greatest technological advancement and achievement in human history, according to a current NASA astronaut, it's been destroyed. So the F-1 rocket engine powered that first stage of the Saturn V. Five F-1 engines on each Saturn V generated 7.6 million pounds of thrust between them, enough to lift a fully fueled Saturn V off the launch pad and accelerate it past supersonic speeds. The F-1 remains to this day the most powerful single-nozzle liquid rocket engine ever successfully flown. NASA has been trying to recreate it for the Space Launch Series program. They have the original blueprints, they have the specifications, they have actual original engines in museums that they could pull apart and study, and they have 50 years of additional materials in science, but they cannot rebuild it. According to NASA engineer on the F1 engine reconstruction effort, Ertz, this is what they said in a space news interview. We have had to learn how to manufacture again. The knowledge was there, but the people, the processes, the procedures, the manufacture, the supply chain, the documentation, all of that was gone. And so now to be fair to NASA, when they say we destroyed the technology, what they mean is institutional knowledge. The people who built those engines, they either retired or they died. The factories closed, the specialized suppliers, they went out of business. The tribal knowledge, the stuff that engineers know but never quite get written down, that's what banished. That's the steel man version of the story. But here's where I get hung up on it. We built engines that lifted 3,000 tons off the earth in 1969. We built them 18 times. They worked perfectly every single time. And then we let the institutional knowledge die so we can so completely that 20 years and billions of dollars later, it's more than 20 years, but billions of dollars later, we still haven't matched what we're supposedly did with the slide pool. Either our ancestors were engineering geniuses on a level we genuinely cannot comprehend today, or the original engineering challenge was not exactly what we've been told it was. Let's talk about this point too. The Apollo guidance computer, it navigated the spacecraft to the moon and back. It weighed 70 pounds. It had 4,096 words of memory. It was had less processing power than a monarch pocket calculator. And it successfully guided 12 men through a quarter million miles of space. NASA has spent 20 years developing the Orion spacecraft guidance system. The Orion Guidance Computer is thousands of times more powerful than the Apollo guidance computer, and it's still being tested for human missions. So a computer with less power than a digital wristwatch that navigated Apollo to the moon in 69, but in 2026, computers thousands of times more powerful are still being tested and verified before we send humans to the moon. Either our ancestors were doing something we can't replicate, or the navigation challenge of getting to the moon is not exactly what we've been told. Or I guess both things could be true at once. Maybe the math really was simpler than now what we make of it. Or maybe institutional knowledge really did die. Maybe modern requirements are just much higher. And so they're all reasonable explanations which we all think are worth thinking about. So April 3rd, 2023, Johnson Space Center, Houston, Texas, Texas, NASA announced the Artemis II crew like they were unveiling the cast of a blockbuster movie. There was stage lighting, dramatic music, choreographed presentation. Four astronauts walked out onto a stage like actors being introduced in a movie premiere. There was Reed Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Hammock Cook, Jeremy Hansen, the Canadian Space Agent astronaut. The crowd cheered, the cameras flashed, the beauty coverage was uniformly positive, and within hours the internet started asking questions. So six hours after the announcement, posts started showing up on Twitter, Reddit, and TikTok, side by side photo comparisons. Christina Koch next to actresses from action movies, Victor Glover next to an actor headshot, claims about entertainment industry backgrounds, screenshots of supposedly casting profiles, the similarities, they were striking. Striking enough that thousands of people noticed them at the same time. Wait a second. This astronaut has the same facial structures and the same expressions and the same general appearance as this actor who is an IMDB? So social media claims they're of course not fact, and people can look like other people without being them. Conspiracy theorists, they spiral on superficial resemblance constantly, and most of them are wrong. But the volume and speed of these comparisons is at least worth noticing. What was it about the way these astronauts were presented that made so many people independently and immediately think actors? What triggered that pattern recognition? So I don't know. I'm just asking the question. So Artemis II was originally scheduled for November 2024, but delays pushed it to September 2025, then in early 2026, and then to February 2026, then to March 2026, and after launch scrubs from a hydrogen leak and a helium issue, the mission finally lifted off on April 1st, 2026. So approximately they went 10 days around the moon. They did not land on it, so no lunar landing, just a flyby to test the systems. This is the first crewed mission beyond low Earth orbit since Apollo 17 in 1972. And almost everything went perfectly. Now, there were the launch scrums leading up to it, that's documented, but once Artemis II was off the pad, it operated almost without a hitch. No major unexpected problems, no life-threatening crisis, no improvisation required. Now, compare that to the actual Apollo missions. Apollo 11, there was computer alarms during the lunar descent that nearly aborted the landing. Apollo 12, there was a lightning strike during the launch, and Apollo 13, an oxygen tank that exploded and nearly killed the crew. Real space missions are messy, and real space missions they break. And Artemis 2 went like a script. So April 11th, 2026, the Pacific Ocean recovery right off the coast of San Diego, California. Hundreds of people gathered at recovery sites and viewing parties to welcome the crew home. The first humans returning from beyond low Earth orbit in 54 years. And every person in those crowds was holding up a phone to record this historic moment to capture memories and to document the moment. And a wave of social media posts started circulating. Posts claiming that in some clips of the ceremony, the phone screens in the crowd didn't match what was happening in real time. The iPhones supposedly showing the astronauts walking across the recovery ship deck while the actual astronauts were still being helped out of the capsule. Phones showing footage of the crew waving while the actual crew was still in medical evaluation. The claim, depending on which version you read, was that hundreds of people in the crowd were holding props. Phones playing pre-recorded footage of the event that they were supposedly witnessing live. Now, I do want to be careful here. Some of these fake phone comparisons that went viral were debunked pretty quickly. The footage that looked mismatched in several cases was just a delay between live broadcast on phones and what was happening in front of the camera. That could be a real explanation. But the claim took off online for a reason. And after everything else, this episode covers the destroyed technology we can't rebuild, the missing tapes, awkward astronauts, the Hollywood crew announcement, and then the recovery happened and something looked off. And a lot of people were ready to see it as confirmation. Whether the phones were actually fake is something you'll have to research yourself. What's interesting to me is that by 2026, NASA had to spend the day after a successful lunar mission explaining a viral conspiracy theory. There's also this International Space Station live footage. There's astronauts working in laboratory modules. These are sophisticated electronics worth hundreds of millions of dollars all around them. There's open circuit boards, there's wire bundles, there's computer displays, and floating right next to all of that electronics is water droplets, multiple droplets. And it's just freely floating through the station. And I don't understand how these professional astronauts are playing with the water next to all this electronic and circuitry. Doesn't make any sense. And then in just about every piece of ISS footage, astronaut hair, it behaves funny. It stands straight up, stiff, motionless, very unnatural looking. And in true zero gravity, you would think hair should float freely in all directions. It should move with air currents. And what I mean by that is when you move, you know, every force has an equal and opposite reaction, right? So if I move, my hair should move too because I'm putting a force on it. Um, but that's not what it does. Uh sometimes it does, but in most of the clips, in a striking number of clips, it just stands at attention, like it's been hit with a can of industrial hairspray. So I've watched a lot of the ISS footage, as most people have, and it's not consistent at all. Sometimes it's exactly what you would kind of expect to see, and other times, like I said, that hair is standing up a rigid, sprayed-up version that looks more like hair under, you know, a controlled hair flow environment, right? It I mean, could it be styling product? I don't know. Could it be different cabin conditions and different modules, or could it be something else? I'm not telling you what it is. I'm just telling you that if you watch 10 minutes of ISS B-roll on a phone with the sound off, you start to notice it. And mom like multiple ISS videos show something else that should be impossible. They show astronauts getting tangled in things that aren't there. This is where people really sink their claws into this. So it shows astronauts flung, they're just floating smoothly through the station, and then suddenly jerking to a stop, like something caught them, and then they are reaching over their heads to untangle invisible cables, making pulling motions like they're dealing with harness equipment. In one piece of footage, an astronaut reaches over and he adjusts another astronaut's invisible equipment, and they both laugh, and one says, Getting tangled up again. The question is, tangled up in what? If you were, you know, filming and you needed to show what it looked like to be weightless, maybe there would be harness apparatuses in front of a green screen, right? And sometimes the editing would be imperfect, and you could remove those visible cables, but leave behind the astronauts' interactions with those cables, which would look exactly like people getting tangled up in invisible wires. I'm not telling you that's what's happening. I'm telling you that if you wanted to find the evidence that this is what's happening, this is what the evidence would actually look like. Also, there's this one. May 30th, 2020, SpaceX Falcon 9 launch. It was a live broadcast on NASA TV and SpaceX YouTube channel. Millions watched it in real time, and during the second stage burn, something moved across the engine nozzle. A small gray object, and it was moving independently against the backdrop of the rocket engine firing in a vacuum. Enhanced analysis showed four legs, a tail, fur, a mouse running on the outside of a spacecraft in space. Now, SpaceX never officially commented on that footage. The video was removed from their YouTube channel within 24 hours. So either it was a mouse surviving in vacuum on the outside of a rocket traveling at 17,500 miles per hour, which is biologically and physically impossible. Or maybe it was a piece of ice debris that just happened to look like a small rodent. Or it was a mouse that wandered onto a film set. I'm not sure which. I'm just telling you that it requires the fewest options, the impossible options. You know, Occam's razor. What do you think it is? Then there's the ISS spacewalk footage itself. Astronauts performing maintenance outside of the station. Standard EVA procedures. They're broadcast live for over 20 years now. In a number of those spacewalk videos, the astronauts, their helmet visors, they act like convex mirrors. They reflect whatever is in front of them. And in several clips that have circulated online, those reflections, according to viewers, show people wearing scuba diving equipment with their full face masks, their breathing apparatuses, and the kind of gear you'd need for underwater filming. To be fair, most of those scuba diver claims have been debunked. You know, of course they have. The reflections are usually just another astronaut in spacesuits or distorted reflection of the spacecraft itself or image compare compression when it artifacts. But you'll find serious analysis online showing the diver interpretation is wrong. But the broader point still lands. Those helmet reflections, they're hard to fake. And whatever was reflected in those visors was actually present when the footage was made. And NASA has a 6.2 million gallon pool in Houston where they trained all their astronauts. And they do it in identical spacesuits and they record that training. And it is, I have to admit, sometimes very hard to tell the difference between training footage and the real ISS spacewalks. Sonny Carter Training Facility. It's located at 1000 sorry sorry 10,550 Aerospace Avenue, Houston, Texas. So 10550 Aerospace Avenue, Houston, Texas. Inside is the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory. That's what I'm talking about, the pool. 202 feet long, 102 feet wide, and 40 feet deep. It's got 6.2 million gallons of water, and it's the largest indoor pool in the world, according to my research. Large enough, and this is documented, not me being clever, large enough to submerge a full-stale, full-scale International Space Station. And this is where the astronauts they train for spacewalks. They train in the spacesuits that are identical to the ones used in space. They're weighted so that they achieve neutral buoyancy, which means the suit doesn't float up or it doesn't sink down. It just kind of hangs there in the water, which feels like weightlessness, which looks like weightlessness, you know, if you feel it correctly. So astronauts spend hundreds of hours in this pool, six to eight hours of underwater training for every hour of spacewalk that they will supposedly perform in space. They practice every procedure, every tool manipulation, every movement sequence until they can perform spacewalks perfectly underwater. So here's what I want you to do after you finish listening to this episode. Open YouTube, search that neutral buoyancy laboratory and watch the underwater training footage. And then search ISS spacewalk and watch the actual spacewalk footage and ask yourself honestly, can you tell the difference? And there are differences. There's real space footage has stars in some of the shots, and real space uh footage shows the curvature of the earth and certain lighting characteristics that water can't quite replicate. So people who do this for a living, they say they can tell the difference. But for the regular viewer, look at the training footage and the spacewalk footage side by side, they look really similar. They say movements, same procedures. But of course, that's what they're trained to do, right? But here's the thing that gets me. If NASA can film astronauts underwater performing spacewalks that look this like so much like the spacewalks in space, why would they ever need to send astronauts to space to film the spacewalks? They have everything they need in Houston. I'm not telling you they're using the pool for live broadcasts. I'm just telling you the capability exists and the facility exists and the expertise exists, and it's documented on NASA's L website, and that's what the conspiracy theorists are saying. Then there's, you know, the footprint that doesn't match. Let's talk about that. So, Apollo 11, let's go back to 1969. The most famous footprint in human history. It's Buzz Aldrin's boot impression in Lever Dust. It's clear ridges, deep treads, perfectly detailed. Um, sorry, not Buzz. Neil Armstrong's boot imprint. That's my faux pas. I should not have said that. So it's Neil Armstrong's boot impression. Now, you need to go back and look at Neil Armstrong's space suit. It's in the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. The actual Apollo 11 mission suit. So that's the actual suit. Actual boots worn by the first man supposedly to walk in the moon. So they have that artifact in the museum. The boots, though, are smooth. There's no treads, no ridges. They could not have made that famous footprint. Well, here's NASA's explanation, which I want to give to you because it's a good one. NASA says, Oh, the lunar overshoe, the LOS, was worn over the spacesuit's integral boots during moon walks. The overshoes had blue silicone soles with distinctive tread patterns and were left on the moon to save weight. So they had lunar overshoes and they left those on the moon to save weight on their return back. So the boots in the Smithsonian are smooth, and those are the inner boots of the spacesuit. And the treaded overshoes are still up there on the lunar surface. And that explanation makes perfect sleep sense. It accounts for every discrepancy. It's technologically, you know, it's plausible. So that's kind of interesting. Here's where conspiracy theorists again start digging their little claws in. The American flag on the lunar surface appears to wave in multiple Apollo photos and videos. But there's no atmosphere on the moon, no wind. So NASA's explanation is the fabric continues moving in vacuum because there's no air resistance to dampen its motion. That's scientifically accurate. Once you set the fabric in motion in a vacuum, it'll keep moving longer than it would in air. But watch the video footage carefully. Sometimes the flag moves when no one's near it. And sometimes it hangs perfectly still while astronauts are working right next to it. The motion is inconsistent with the activity in the frame. And then there's Apollo 17 lunar module takeoff. Perfect cinematography following that spacecraft as it rises from the lunar surface. But both astronauts are already inside the spacecraft. So who operated the camera? NASA's explanation is the camera was operated remotely from mission control in Houston, with the timing calculated to account for the several second radio delay between Earth and Moon. A flawless execution. So either NASA's 1970s remote control technology was significantly more sophisticated than anything they've demonstrated since. And remember, by 1972, they're already telling us they're losing capabilities. Or the camera was being operated from much closer than the moon. And to be clear, the remote camera explanation has been examined and it's technically plausible given the documented setup. But it's another one of those moments where the official answer requires you to believe NASA. And sometimes that's generally hard to do. Last episode, we talked about Jack Parsons. So let me bring him back into this episode because if you missed episode nine, what we're about to talk about is going to feel like it kind of came out of nowhere. So Jack Parsons, he co-founded the Jet Propulsion Laboratory on Halloween night in 1936 in a dry canyon in Pasadena that he genuinely believed was a portal to hell. He spent his evenings running an occult lodge out of a mansion in Pasadena, performing ritual magic and chanting Alistair Crowley's poems before his rocket tests as a good luck chart. He performed a series of ritual workings in the California desert in early 1946 with a man named L. Ron Hubbard. Yes, the same L. Ron Hubbard who would later found the Church of Scientology, and they both believed they were summoning a goddess. That was episode 9. So every fact in that is documented, every court, every quote is sourced. None of that is theory or conspiracy. Now, here's where the conspiracy theorists start to pick up a thread, and I'm going to walk you through what they say because once you've heard it, you will see it pop up everywhere. The argument goes like this. JPL didn't just have a strange founder. JPL, and by extension, NASA, which absorbed the JPL in 1958 when the agency was created, was built on the spiritual foundation that Parsons had laid. And that foundation never really got cleaned up. The lodge ended, the personnel changed, the mansion got demolished, but the ritual orientation theorists claim that stayed. And I've heard it framed a few different ways. Some people say NASA was, from its inception, a project of esoteric believers who saw rocketry as a spiritual exercise, exactly the way Paris Parsons saw it. Some people go further and claim there's a continuity of ritual practice within the agency that has never gone public. They point to launch dates that they say correlate with significant dates on various occult calendars. And they point to mission patches with imagery that reads as esoteric. They also point to specific astronaut behaviors at precedents. The flag with 13 stripes, the handshakes, the colors. So I'm not telling you to believe any of this is true, and um I have not verified that the launch date claims are accurate. But what circulates online is that people are genuinely finding pattern matching. And if you look hard enough, I suppose at any organization, you could find imagery that kind of matches almost anything you're looking for. But here are two pieces of this thread that I think at worth, they're worth at minimum, sitting for a minute. And this one is so simple it's almost embarrassing. Every rocket launch you have ever watched has used the same countdown. 10, 9, 8, 7, and so on, down to zero, with the word T minus attached. And I've heard rocket countdowns my entire life, and so have you. And until I started writing this episode, I never really asked the most obvious question. Why T minus? What does the T stand for? I mean, to me it just sounded like it was something official, and so I accepted it as truth, right? And it's such a familiar phrase that it just sounds like it always existed. T minus 10, T minus 5, lift off. Nobody ever explains it because nobody ever asks. So I went and I looked it up, and here's the official answer. NASA says T, pronounced T minus, refers to the time remaining on the official countdown clock. The T stands for time. So that's the official meaning per NOAA and NASA. T stands for time. But there's another official meaning. NASA's own launch director, Mike Lindbach, said something different in a 2006 podcast that the T actually stands for test. Because the T minus countdown isn't really a wall clock. It's a sequence of planned events, a schedule. It can pause, it can stop, and restart. It is technically a test plan, not a stopwatch. So depending on which NASA source you ask, the T stands for time or for test. And here's one more piece of trivia that's actually fun. The countdown convention itself. The whole idea of counting down to a launch. That wasn't invented by NASA. That came from a 1929 German science fiction movie. It was one of those silent movies called Frau in Mom. It's Woman in the Moon. It was directed by Fritz Lang, and he invented the countdown as a dramatic device for the movie. The military picked it up and NASA inherited it. So that's the documented history. T equals time or test, and it was borrowed from that 1929 German rocket movie. Now, here's what conspiracy theorists do with this. They look at T minus and say, sure, that's the official explanation, but they also point out that the T sits in the center of another word, Satan. Take the T out of Satan and you have S A A N and rearrange those letters and you get NASA. The letters in NASA, N A S A, are exactly the letters in Satan with the T removed. Rearranged, same letters, different order, and anagram. Theorists go further and read the T minus countdown itself as a ritual phrase. So T minus in their readings isn't time, it's the T being subtracted every countdown, every launch, every T minus. I think that's interesting. Essentially they're saying that the ritual is they're saying Satan. Satan. Before the rocket goes up. And here's where I land on this. Maybe the T minus officially stands for time or test. The countdown convention from a German movie that's been settled too. The anagram thing N-A-SA being the same letters as S A T A N minus the T is real. In the sense that, yeah, the letters check out. Anagrams are not evidence of intent. You can rearrange the letters into almost anything you want, but I'd say it deserves to use this kind of phrase Neil Armstrong might have used to be considered as one of truth's protective layers. So notice it, file it, move on. But also, this is the part I want to leave you with. Every single time you hear a NASA countdown for the rest of your life, you're now going to hear T minus differently than you used to. And I'm sorry for that. There's no taking it back now, and you'll just hear it. And whether you think it's for T is for time or test or Satan, that's just where we are right now. Okay, so whether or not you buy any of the Satanism and the rituals and stuff, I'm not asking you to. There's a less spooky version of this argument that I do think is worth taking seriously. And here it is. The American Space Program was founded by people with very strange beliefs. We had Werner Von Braun, who was an SOS officer with a falsified war record, who was buried under a Bible verse about the firmament. And we'll get to that. Walt Disney was an FBI informant who put Von Braun on television. Jack Parsons was an occultist who founded the JPL on Halloween at a site he called the Portal to Hell. And whatever you call those beliefs, esoteric, occult, ideological, religious, whatever, they are not the beliefs. The original narratives wants you to associate with the space program. The official narrative is about the engineers and astronauts and clean rooms and slide rules. The real founders, though, had spiritual lives that they were significantly weirder about. That's all documented, and that is not theory. Now, what the conspiracy theorists are arguing is that those beliefs didn't go away, that whatever persons brought to that canyon on Halloween night in 1936 is still in some form present at the JPL today. They point out to Halloween, it's called Nativity Day, and it's a celebration that they have. And it's every Halloween. They celebrate Nativity Day at the JPL. We keep coming back to that museum in Hutchinson, Kansas, an hour away from you know Derby, Wichita area, where I'm sitting right now. It's on Highway 50 in the middle of the flat Kansas Prairie, the population about 40,000. There it is. It's the Cosmosphere. And in the German gallery, there was a slide rule that belonged to Werner von Braun, the V2 rocket. That's also there. The Nazi technology that came to America in suitcases with falsified records in 1945. In the Apollo gallery, there is the command module, the lunar rover replica with the wire mesh wheels we walked through with the last episode, and the spacesuits that supposedly protected human life in the vacuum of space. All the artifacts of the official story are lined up, they're lit, they're captured, and they're presented like they're settled. But now, after four episodes of this series, you know what the museum doesn't tell you. It talks about the tunnels, it doesn't talk about the tunnels in Germany where concentration camp prisoners died building von Braun's V-2 rockets. Or the 50 570-page FBI file on a man who put von Braun on television. Or Halloween Night in a Canyon where the occultist founded JPL. Or the nuclear weapons that were fired at the sky in 1962. And it doesn't talk about the astronauts who died asking questions about Apollo before it even began. Or that radiation should have killed 20% of those Apollo crews. And it doesn't talk about the astronauts who came home and didn't act like heroes. The technology we destroyed and can't rebuild, the original tapes that were erased, and the program we ended exactly when we mastered it. And now you know the T minus question that you can't unhear now. So next time you're driving through Highway 50 in Kansas, looking at the endless flat horizon under the dome of sky, and yes, I know what I just said, and yes, I picked the word dome on purpose. Remember this. Your ancestors looked up and saw exactly what you see: a flat earth under a vault of sky. They trusted their senses, they described what they experienced, and for 5,000 years, every culture on this continent and every other one came back with the same description. I'm not telling you they were right, I'm telling you it's worth knowing what they said before you decide that they were wrong. And next time Yuri Hutchinson walks through the cosmosphere, look at the artifacts, and read the official story and ask yourself, who built this narrative? And who told you what was above? So for 5,000 years, just about every culture on earth they agreed about what was above their heads. And they disagreed about gods, they disagreed about governments, they disagreed about who was the right people were and how to live, but they agreed about the physical structure of the world. And day two of creation in the Bible of Genesis, this is what it says. And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. And God made the firmament, and he divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament, and it was so. And God called the firmament heaven. The original Hebrew word in that passage is rakiah. Rikia comes from the verb requi, which means to pound, to hammer, to spread out like a beating, like hammering metal into sheets, like beating gold into thin plates. The brown driver Briggs, Hebrew and English lexicon says the Hebrew lexigraphicers, brown driver and briggs, glossed the noun with extended surface, solid expanse, as if beaten out, and distinguished the two main uses, the bolt of heaven or firmament, regarded by Hebrews as a solid and supporting waters above it. So ancient translators, they understood this. The Greek Septuagint translated Rekia as steroma, meaning solid structure. The Latin Bulgate translated it as fermentum, meaning a strengthening support, like a brace. And for more than a thousand years of biblical scholarship, the most educated theologians in the world understood the passage to mean a solid dome above the earth. Now, take everything we just talked about it and put it next to what we opened this episode with. 1962 Operation Fishbowl, nuclear weapons fired at the sky. Several tests failed, rockets explode before reaching their target altitude. And after 1962, we agreed we're gonna stop trying that. So we had the partial test ban treaty of 63, and then one year later, Kennedy promised we're gonna go to the moon. So I'm not saying that Operation Fishbowl was an attempt to break through that firmament. The explanation, that high altitude nuclear effects research and EMP studies and missile defense preparations the explanation, that's the documented record. Um, but here's what I think is worth sitting with. If you generally believed there was a solid dome above the earth, like every culture did for 5,000 years, and you had access to nuclear weapons in 1962, and you wanted to test that theory, you would do exactly what they did. You would fire nuclear weapons at the highest altitude you could reach under a code name about Fish and a bull looking up at a glass dome. It's just kind of an interesting choice of words, isn't it? When the dome, whatever it is, couldn't be broken, the story changed. Instead of going up to space, the suggestion is space came down to us on television screens, in pools with actors and scripts. Because if you can't break the dome, the theory goes, you convince people the dome doesn't exist. And that's what they say. Or alternatively, the rockets really did break through and the moon landings really did happen, and Operation Fishbowl really was just nuclear effects testing, and Verno Bon Braun's gravestone is just a coincidence. And everything in the official record is exactly what it appears to be. So what is above? That's the question we started with this series. Episode seven, we had Operation Paperclip, the Nazi war criminals brought to America with the falsified records. Four episodes later, we have the complete case in front of us. We know about Operation Paperclip, the Nazis, we know about if the Walt Disney and the FBI, and uh, we know about Jack Parsons and his Halloween night uh trying to um summon a goddess. We know about Operation Fishbowl, we know about Apollo 1 and the astronauts who called the spacecraft a lemon that was testified, that were going to testify in front of Augurus Congress. They died three weeks before in a fire that they could not escape. We know about the Van Allenbelts and the 20% mortality rate that was predicted, yet zero astronauts were harmed. And we know about the astronaut behavior, heroes who don't act like heroes, and truth's protective layers in animation, and then we didn't go there, and then that punch in Beverly Hills. And we know about the destroyed technology, F1 engines we can't re-build from blueprints, computer systems thousands of times more powerful than Apollo's that still aren't ready, and we know about those missing tapes deliberately erased, replaced with computer-enhanced television broadcasts of recordings that no longer exist. And we know about the canceled missions and that the Soviets kept exploring, and we know about Artemis, and that the Hollywood crew looks like it might be the same people as the astronauts, and we know about the ISS, and that you know, hair doesn't quite move right, and that there's astronauts tangled in wires, and we know about that pool in Houston where it's big enough that it's got the entire space station um submerged in it so that they can train. And then there's that footage of the convex mirrors on their visors showing scuba divers in their reflection. We know about the lunar evidence. The footprints, the flag, the remote camera operating from the moon. And we know about the patterns nobody mentions, the Halloween Nativity Day, the T minus you can't hear, the anagram you can't unsee. And we know about the firmament from 5,000 years of human agreement about a solid dome, and a Hebrew word that means hammered out, and ancient translators who all read it the same way. And we know who was telling us the whole time that none of that was real, that space was infinite and that rockets were perfect, and that astronauts were heroes, and the moon was just another physical place. So NASA, National Aeronautics and Space Administration. There's a Hebrew word Nasha. And Nasha means to lead astray, to delude, to deceive greatly and utterly. Now, NASA and Nasha, they're not the same word, they're different languages, different etymologies, totally coincidence on paper, but they sound similar enough that if you heard someone say Nasha out loud in the conversation, you might think they said NASA. So I'm not claiming that NASA intentionally chose a name that sounds like that Hebrew word for deception. But that's the observation people have made. And the agency that has told us for 60 years that humans can travel beyond the firmament has a name that sounds remarkably like the ancient Hebrew word for leading people astray. And after everything we've covered tonight, the Nazis, the FBI, the nuclear tests, the failed attempts, the actors, the pools, the missing tapes, maybe that similarity is actually worth just a moment of consideration. And I've been telling you all night, I wasn't going to answer the moon landing question for you. I'm going to keep you that promise. And here's where I stand on it. And you can take it or you can leave it. I think the rockets flew. The Saturn V left the pad, and that's documented. The Soviets tracked it, the world watched it, the thing went up. And I think there are moon rocks. They've been studied in dozens of countries. They are by independent verification actual lunar material. What I'm not sure about, and what this episode is asking you to consider is whether what half a billion people watched on television on a night, July 20th, 1969, was actually a real-time feed of two men walking on the lunar surface, or whether some of it, or most of it, was something else, a studio, a backdrop, a preserved narrative version that NASA preferred to broadcast over a technically risky live feed from the moon. And that's where I sit. That's not the same as the moon landing, it was fake, it's not the same as we never went, it's just a more careful question. And it's the question this whole series has been circling. But you don't have to land where I land. Maybe everything I just told you fits inside the official story. Every documented detail has an explanation if you want it. The radiation models could have been wrong, the tapes could have honestly been lost, and the astronauts could have been just emotionally overwhelmed. So the T- could be just time. And the Hebrew word coincidence could be just coincidence, right? All of that's possible. All of it is even in some sense plausible. Or maybe none of it fits. Where do you stand? Tonight, you have heard what I have, you've heard what I've heard, and now it's yours. Something I've been holding back though for ten um episodes. Something that connects everything we've talked about tonight, and everything we've talked about across this entire series. There's something about the man who built the rockets that supposedly took humans to the moon. Werner von Braun. He died on June 16th, 1977. He was 75 years old. He had lived in the United States for 32 years since Operation Paperclip brought him here from Germany. He had received the National Medal of Science. He'd been inducted into the National Academy of Engineering. He had a NASA space flight center named after him. He is buried in Ivy Hill Cemetery in Alexandria, Virginia. And he was celebrated publicly and officially as the father of the American Space Program. His gravestone is simple, his name, his dates, and one Bible verse. The man who supposedly sent humans to the mound chose his own epitaph, the final statement that would mark his grave for eternity. Imagine you had built the rockets that supposedly carry humanity to the stars. What would you put on your gravestone? Maybe a verse about exploration, about courage, about reaching for infinity, maybe something about science, about discovery, about the cosmos. He put Psalm nineteen, verse one on. Psalm nineteen, verse one, reads The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament sheeth his handiwork. The firmament showeth his handiwork. The man who built the Sodern V rocket, the man who designed the engines that supposedly carrying twelve astronauts to the moon, the man who had spent his entire adult life supposedly sending machines of people beyond the firmament chose to be buried under a Bible verse about the firmament. Not about infinite space, not about galaxies, not about the cosmos, but about the firmament. The hammered out expanse, the solid dome. Werner von Braun spent his entire career being celebrated for breaking the barriers that confined humanity to Earth. And he chose words that would mark his grave forever. He chose a verse about the solid dome above our heads. There are a few ways to read that. Maybe he genuinely believed Psalm 19 was just a beautiful poetic line about creation, and he was a religious man, and that's all there was to it. Or maybe he was mocking the God he claimed to serve. Or, and this is the version that haunts me, frankly, maybe he was leaving a message for the people who would come after him, the ones who would understand exactly what he had spent his life looking up at. Maybe he was telling us in the only place he could. This has been episode 10 of Just Killing Time. It's the end of the space series. Thank you for killing time with me.

SPEAKER_00 1:35:21

Alexa, what is a chemtrail? Chemtrails. Trails left by aircraft are actually chemical or biological agents deliberately sprayed at high altitudes for a purpose undisclosed to the general public in clandestine programs directed by government officials.