| Current mood: |  depressed |
| Current music: | Morning Report With Mark & Steve, WOC AM 1420 |
PLEASE BE INFORMED THAT THERE IS A SANTA CLAUS
I fully expected that, by the end of the century, we would have achieved substantially more than we actually did.
~~~~Neil Alden Armstrong (August 5, 1930 – August 25, 2012)
If anything good is going to come out of the passing of Neil Armstrong, it will come in the form of someone, most probably one of the hosts of Coast, playing an interview of him that was recorded with the strict instructions that it be revealed only after his death that will clarify exactly what he saw on, on the way to and on the way back from the moon.
Don't hold your breath, though, because I called my bookie, Shifty The Norwegian (The man who taught Jimmy The Greek everything he knew about betting, odds and racial sensitivity) and he says that the chances are not good. So we may never know if the Pepper Transcript was a fabrication or not and all we'll have is what we've always had (Aside from a vast amount of disputed claims that go all over the board which may or may not be true): the official NASA transcript of the debriefing of Neil and Buzz talking about the cylindrical object that sure seems to be a UFO that most people tend to just ignore as if it doesn't exist like they're under some sort of spell or something.
If Shifty is wrong, however, and Neil's confession does exist and has been safely delivered to the media, I hope it is George Knapp (http://www.coasttocoastam.com/pages/george-knapp) who gets to break the story. I don't know if I've ever told you this before but I wish he would quit his day job and start doing Coast full time. Preferably a weekly prime-time edition on Wednesday nights from 8-12.
Now that we've covered the depressing side of space, official coverups, alien induced mass indifference and stupid shortsighted network executives who don't see the value of brand extensions, let's move to a happier sector of space, Tau Ceti and one of my all time favorite heroines, Barbarella.
And the reason we bring her up, aside from the fact that the space theme and timing (Barbarella was released in 1968, just one year before Neil became the most famous astronaut ever) fit right in is that Jane Fonda has done it again, this time playing a villain in her second greatest role, Leona Lansing in The Newsroom.
And last night, Leona was at her best. Of course, because God and network executives have king-sized senses of humor, it was the last episode of the season. The good news is that there will be a next season and in the meantime, the void may be filled by George Knapp giving us the full unvarnished truth of what Neil saw and didn't see and what he thought about it in his own words. Stranger things have happened and it would only be odd if long-shots like that didn't pay off all the time.
PS For anyone who's interested in such things, PLEASE BE INFORMED THAT THERE IS A SANTA CLAUS was transmitted by Jim Lovell on December 25, 1968 after the Apollo 8 command module cleared the radio shadow of the dark side of the Moon and you can Google it and find a million sites, some that seem credible and some that don't, that explain how he was or was not talking about alien spacecraft and decide for yourself. Just remember, the water gets muddier the deeper you go.
PPS Here is a portion of the NASA transcript about the cylindrical object. Again, you can Google it all day and then decide for yourself:
Aldrin: The first unusual thing that we saw I guess was one day out or something pretty close to the moon. It had a sizeable dimension to it, so we put the monocular on it.
Collins: How'd we see this thing ? Did we just look out the window and there it was.
Aldrin: Yes, and we weren't sure but what it might be the S-IVB. We called the ground and were told the S-IVB was 6,000 miles away. We had a problem with the high gain about this time, didn't we ?
Collins: There was something. We felt a bump or maybe I just imagined it.
Armstrong: He was wondering whether the MESA had come off.
Collins: I don't guess we felt anything.
Aldrin: Of course, we were seeing all sorts of little objects going by at the various dumps and then we happened to see this one brighter object going by. We couldn't think of anything else it could be other than the S-IVB. We looked at it through the monocular and it seemed to have a bit of an L shape to it.
Armstrong: Like an open suitcase.
Aldrin: We were in PTC at the time so each of us had a chance to take a look at this and it certainly seemed to be within our vicinity and of a very sizeable dimension.
Armstrong: We should say it was right at the limit of the resolution of the eye. It was very difficult to tell what shape it was. And there was no way to tell the size without knowing the range or the range without knowing the size.
Aldrin: So then I got down in the LEB and started looking for it in the optics. We were grossly misled because with the sextant off focus what we saw appeared to be a cylinder.
Armstrong: Or really two rings.
Aldrin: Yes.
Armstrong: Two rings. Two connected rings.
Aldrin: Yes.
Collins: No, it looked like a hollow cylinder to me. It didn't look like two connected rings. You could see this thing tumbling and, when it came around end-on, you could look right down in it's guts. It was a hollow cylinder. But then you could change the focus on the sextant and it would be replaced by this open book shape. It was really weird.
Aldrin: I guess there's not too much more to say about it other than it wasn't a cylinder.
Collins: It was during the period when we thought it was a cylinder that we inquired about the S-IVB and we'd almost convinced ourselves that's what it had to be. But we don't have any more conclusions than that really. The fact that we didn't see it much past this one period --- we really don't have a conclusion as to what it might have been, how big it was, or how far away it was. It was something that wasn't part of the urine dump, we're pretty sure of that.
PPPS Some stupid shortsighted movie studio executive somewhere should get his head out of his Romney and do a Barbarella sequel and The Newsroom should have 42 week seasons.
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