Read Ancient Aliens on the Moon for Free Online

they were the most vulnerable members of all of human society. It doesn’t take a proverbial rocket scientist to conclude that NASA took these recommendations and transformed them into policy at the highest levels. Nor would it be surprising if the whole question of “artifacts” were considered a national security issue – given (again) NASA’s founding charter position as “a defense agency of the United States.”
    Although the document itself is fairly obscure today, this was not so in the early 1960’s. The New York Times published a brief summary of the Brookings Report in December, 1960. It was apparent from the Times’ treatment of the Report that the potential for a social meltdown if such explosive information ever became public was considered a prime threat to the existing social order. “MANKIND IS WARNED TO PREPARE FOR DISCOVERY OF LIFE IN SPACE: Brookings Institution Report Says Earth’s Civilization Might Topple if Faced by a Race of Superior Beings,” the December 15 th , 1960 headline screamed breathlessly.
    As part of our research for Dark Mission , Richard C. Hoagland also discovered that The Brookings Report was the basis for Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick’s seminal film 2001: A Space Odyssey. In fact, according to a 1968 Playboy interview, Kubrick could quote from the Brookings Report chapter and verse. In the interview, he quoted the exact passages shown above, and declared that the whole question of covering up the discovery of artifacts to be the central theme of his legendary film.
    From early on, Brookings officially affirmed NASA’s expectation that the agency would inevitably fly to nearby planets in the solar system, and would thus be physically capable, for the first time, of confronting “extraterrestrials” right in their own backyard. Obviously, this goes a long way to explaining the sometimes irrational “skepticism” that most mainstream NASA- funded scientists have regarding the whole ET question. It also might go a long way to explaining some of NASA’s later behavior as their exploration of the solar system actually began.
Early Unmanned Probes
    Armed with this new legal and political cover, both NASA and the Soviet space programs were free to begin going to the Moon and beyond. The Russian were the first to try.
    The Soviet Luna program began in 1957 and its objective from the beginning was to successfully send an unmanned probe to the Moon and crash it there. While this may seem like a goal of questionable value today, at the time it would have been a major achievement on the scale of Sputnik itself. But when the idea was first conceived, no one knew for certain just how difficult it would turn out to be to actually navigate to the Moon, much less to the Moon and back as would be necessary for a manned mission to our nearest neighbor.
    As I extensively documented in The Choice , and as Richard C. Hoagland and I covered in the extended edition of Dark Mission , it turned out that simply launching a probe into Earth orbit and then aiming it at and actually hitting the Moon was quite a challenge. Flatly, it should not have been. The mathematics involved and the calculations for gravity were well known, even in the late 1950’s. All that should have been required was to get a probe up into space and then fire the rocket to the point the Moon would be in a few days. The Moon, after all, has a diameter of more than 2,160 miles. That’s a pretty big target. But neither the Russians nor the Americans could seem to figure out this seemingly straightforward task.
    The Russians were the first to try. Their first three attempts, named Luna-1958A, 1958B and 1958C all failed in the ascent stage of the mission due to problems with the boosters. It wasn’t until Luna 1, actually the 4 th Luna mission, that the Soviets finally got a Luna probe into orbit (the Russians had a habit of not officially recognizing their unsuccessful missions). Once there, the Russians took aim,