NASA Finally Admits the Cover-Up

That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for video restoration.

    
    Forty years after the fact, some of the most historic moments of Apollo 11's televised moonwalk have been brought into sharper focus using computerized image processing techniques. Experts behind the restoration project emphasize that this is a work in progress. (This author is one critic who has consistently pointed out that the purported “moon footage” is useless as proof that we ever landed on the moon.) NASA promises that when the restoration of the moonwalk video is complete, the public will see "the highest-quality video of this historic event." And it only took 40 years!!
    The first TV pictures from another world were captured by a small camera mounted on a hinged assembly on the Apollo 11 lunar module. When Armstrong allegedly stepped out onto the module's platform, he swung the assembly into position. Later in the moonwalk, Armstrong removed the camera from the assembly and mounted it on a tripod for scenes such as the flag-raising. The TV signal was transmitted from the moon using a special slow-scan video format, which had to be converted into the standard broadcast format at downlink stations in Australia  and California. Then, and only then, was the standard signal relayed to NASA and then to broadcasters around the world. No footage was distributed to any outside source until it was “cleared” through at least two government controlled stations.

    The restoration (changing what is not seen into what should have been seen if it was genuine) brings out additional details in the fuzzy video (surprise, surprise.) At the same time it smooths out the electronic "snow" in the picture. When Armstrong steps down the ladder, for instance, his visor and the outline of his spacesuit can be seen within the shadows - something that most viewers couldn't see nearly as well 40 years ago. (Remember how controversial the shadows are as they appear to be inconsistent.)

    Today's announcement blended some bad news with the good news: For years, video sleuths have been looking for the cleaner slow-scan view of the moonwalk which had been saved on tape during the mission. NASA engineer Dick Nafzger and others crossed the globe, searching for those "lost" tapes, but came up empty-handed.

"The recordings are no longer," Nafzger said. Didn’t Nixon say the same thing? Hey, wasn’t he the President then? Did Rosemary Woods work for NASA? Nafzger explained that the video was preserved as one track on a 14-track magnetic tape that also recorded telemetry from the Apollo 11 mission. "This is the only time in the Apollo program we recorded television on a telemetry tape," he said. What a bad yet fortuitous stroke of luck for these masters of deceit.

    After the flight, about 45 tapes thought to contain the slow-scan moonwalk video data were archived as part of a 200,000-tape inventory that NASA kept at Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. Through the years, the archive's managers would determine which tapes were no longer needed. Those tapes would be erased and reused for telemetry from the missions that followed. Of those 200,000 archived tapes, only a very small percent were of the disputed Lunar Mission and wouldn’t you know it, they’re the ones that got erased! Nafzger surmised that the tapes were put into the queue for reuse and eventually were recorded over - perhaps even during a later Apollo or Skylab flight. Because the tapes were primarily used for telemetry, it's likely that no one at the time realized that they were erasing the best video record of the Apollo 11 moonwalk, Nafzger said. These are the very same “Rocket Scientists” who they expect us to believe sent men to the moon.

    “Hey Joe, What about this footage of the very first human walking on the moon in recorded history? Ya think we need those?  “Nah, nobody would believe they’re real anyway.Why?”  “There’s a Knots Landing marathon coming on and the little woman really likes that show.”  “Go ahead, nobody will miss’em.”

    There's still one ray of hope, however: Nafzger and his fellow sleuths discovered that an experiment in slow-scan TV conversion was being conducted at the Parkes Observatory in Australia at the time of the moonwalk, and that two slow-scan tapes might have been made during the moonwalk. "These two tapes, consisting of an hour each, approximately, are still missing. ... they're not in the system," Nafzger said. So the “ray of hope” consists of two tapes that we do not know were actually even made, perchance turning up after 40 years.
    So if the "lost tapes" are still lost, how was the restoration done? Nafzger said he and the rest of his team were "desperate to do something for history if we could." Translation, “If we don’t come up with some footage fast our butts are going to be in a sling.” In the course of their search, they turned up some broadcast-quality imagery that hadn't been seen in nearly 40 years. Some of it came from CBS News, some came from the National Archives, some came from Australia. Some of it even came from an 8mm wind-up film camera that was held up and aimed at a video monitor at NASA's Mission Control Center. NASA digitized the imagery and enlisted California-based Lowry Digital to do some heavy-duty reprocessing.

    The technique was pioneered back in 1971 by company founder John Lowry, when it was used to restore film from the Apollo 16 and 17 missions. More recently, Lowry has lent a hand with restoring classic movies such as "Casablanca" and "Citizen Kane," and sweetening up the visuals for contemporary films such as the Oscar-nominated Brad Pitt movie, "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button."  (Everybody knows how grainy and distorted Brad Pitt looked.) “He aged backwards, he really did, I saw the footage!”

    NASA set strict limits on how much restoration could be done. The first part of the complete moonwalk video will be upside down, just as it was when it was aired in 1969. Dust on the lens and internal reflections are being left in as well. Patrick Edquist, Lowry's project manager for the restoration, said in a company statement. "We could make these images 'perfect,' but at a certain point you begin to lose authenticity,( i.e you would be able to see what’s really going on” )

    During the briefing, Nafzger was asked whether asking a company with Hollywood connections to restore the video might give more ammunition to moon-hoax conspiracy theorists. In response, he pointed out that Lowry's roots with NASA go even deeper than its roots with Hollywood. "I don't care where they're from. This company is restoring historic video," Nafzger said. "This particular company has a history with NASA. ... There couldn't be a more perfect match." Translation: They’ve helped us do this type of revisionist stuff before”(Zapruder maybe?)

    Nafzger acknowledged that the quality in the 1969 broadcast, and most likely in the restored video as well, could have been better. "Some of the degradation that you saw was not necessary," he said. But he pointed out that getting a great picture was not the first priority at the time. 

    In fact, it was exactly the opposite. The less detail the better. A documentary was commissioned by NASA to chronicle the Apollo 11 mission, but fizzled out when it made the rounds in the early 1970s. Recently the original footage was remastered and reissued in a "director's cut" version. Good thing the director had the original 35mm film sitting in boxes under his desk for all those years.(I’m not making this up folks)

"It's surprising to me that NASA didn't have the common sense to save perhaps the most important historical footage of the 20th century," said Rice University historian and author Douglas Brinkley. He noted that NASA saved all sorts of data and artifacts from Apollo 11, and it is "mind-boggling that the tapes just disappeared."

    The remastered copies may look good, but "when dealing with historical film footage, you always want the original to study," Brinkley said. Smithsonian Institution space curator Roger Launius, a former NASA chief historian, said the loss of the original video "doesn't surprise me that much.""It was a mistake, no doubt about that," Launius said. "This is a problem inside the entire federal government." Apparently telling the truth is not that high up on their list either.

    So let’s sum up exactly what is going on here. Respected historians are not surprised that NASA "misplaced” the disputed poor quality video that critics have been attacking for decades and are about to replace it with, “remastered”, “restored”, “tampered with” footage by their own admission. Every time you see the prefix “Re-”, that means “done over again”. Hollywood does this work in computer graphics departments where they, in the words of one expert, “Take film that is of no use to anyone, and change it into something dramatic and realistic looking. “ And THAT’S THE TRUTH.

    Developing the ability to think critically can be difficult because people are apathetic or down right lazy and it is easier to make hasty judgments based on opinions and biases than it is to evaluate facts and arguments. For example, your friends might think that the death penalty is just, and you might also think so just because your friends do, without hearing any arguments to the contrary. Your viewpoint, based solely on the opinions of others, would be weak and, when push came to shove, indefensible.Therefore rational, intelligent thinking has also disappeared as a prerequisite for credibility. In a society where the Theory of Relatively occupies the same shelf in the bookstore as the theory that Elvis is still alive, I wonder, does anybody require proof? Does anyone even know what proof actually is? Please allow me to lay some preliminary groundwork for the amazing theories that you will read in this book. You are not likely to find them to be credible until you find me to be credible.
    There is one foundational principle that all theories should be built upon, and that is truth. Many of the theories which I expound upon in this book have no doubt been written about before. What makes this book different then? Why should you pay good money and invest your precious time in it? The answer to that question needs some explanation.  Let me assure you that you will read nothing between these covers that is not a fact. What a novel idea. Webster defines a fact as: the quality of being actual: actuality; something that has actual existence; an actual occurrence: a piece of information presented as having objective reality. A question of fact hinges on evidence or proof. Once the definition is accepted and understood, the debate shifts from, Is it true? To, is the evidence credible? Facts differ greatly from conjecture or personal experience or alleged eyewitness reports that those who have penned before me are so eager to accept.
    As you follow the path of information regarding each topic covered in this book, I ask that you use the same method of truth identification that is used in a court of law. Ask yourself questions like, “How did this bit of information “turn up” for instance in the case of the JFK assassination, 45 years after the event? Who found it and what if anything do they have to gain? If the author cites a previous work, find that work and be certain that this “New Truth” is not an old fact taken out of context or fabricated out of whole cloth. Establish my credibility in your own mind before you accept at face value the information that I provide. 
    What this author asks is that you, the reader, look at several basic indisputable truths about the subject of the chapter, and then make a decision regarding what you believe based on those truths. What does it mean to believe? The word, believe, as is true with scores of words in the lexicon, does not have the meaning that it originally had. Once again hearken back to the courtroom illustration. In the overwhelming majority of trials, there is no video or photographic evidence. The jury was not present when the offense was committed but is asked to render a verdict  i.e. which side of the case they believe. This belief must be based solely on the evidence presented at trial. Similarly, if you read this book and allow outside sources to effect your conclusions, sources to which I have no access or right of cross examination, you forfeit your right to be an unbiased discerner of my credibility and ultimately, the truth.