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“towers” of seventy feet or more. Such objects, if they really were present on the lunar surface, would almost by definition be artificial. Eons of meteoric bombardment would have long since blasted any such naturally occurring objects into dust.
    The “spires” were first reported on by Thomas O’Toole in the Washington Post the day after they were photographed. A subsequent article in Newsweek magazine added to the intrigue, and William Blair, a Boeing Company anthropologist, was the first to closely scrutinize them. Blair had extensive experience examining aerial survey maps to look for possible prehistoric archeological sites in the Southwest United States. In articles for the Los Angeles Times and then the Boeing News , Blair noted that the “spires” had a series of contextual, geometric relationships to each other. “If such a complex of structures were photographed on Earth, the archeologist’s first order of business would be to inspect and excavate test trenches and thus validate whether the prospective site has archeological significance,” he was quoted in the L.A. Times.

    LO frame 67-H-218

    Lunar Orbiter image LO2-61H3 (NASA)
    The response from Dr. Richard V. Shorthill of the Boeing Scientific Research Laboratory was swift. “There are many of these rocks on the Moon’s surface. Pick some at random and you eventually will find a group that seems to conform to some kind of pattern.” He went on to claim that the long shadows were caused by the fact that ground was sloping away from relatively short objects, thereby elongating the shadows.
    Blair’s rebuttal would later put Shorthill’s arguments in their appropriate context: “If this same axiom were applied to the origin of such surface features on Earth, more than half of the present known Aztec and Mayan architecture would still be under tree- and bush-studded depressions—the result of natural geophysical processes. The science of archeology would have never been developed, and most of the present knowledge of man’s physical evolution would still be a mystery.”
    Subsequent analysis seemed to indicate Shorthill was wrong on all counts.
    In 2001, Lan Fleming of a group calling itself the Lunascan Project, conducted an analysis of the “Blair Cuspids” as they were now known and concluded that the long shadows were caused by tall, spire-like objects. Later analysis indicated that the objects might not be so exceptional after all, and despite Blair’s “limited and highly speculative analysis of suspect coordinate relationships” that seemed to indicate the objects were distributed according to tetrahedral geometry, the general consensus today is that the “Blair Cuspids” are fairly normal boulders that were photographed under unusual lighting conditions. Current Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter images would seem to support that conclusion.
    Lunar Orbiter III was the most prolific of the landing site missions, taking nearly 700 medium and high resolution images of the lunar surface from about 30 miles up. The final two missions, Lunar Orbiters IV and V, were high altitude missions designed for overall lunar mapping purposes. All of the Orbiters were subsequently crashed into the lunar surface intentionally to study tracking capabilities and measure the impacts themselves.
    Having paved the way for landing site selection, the Lunar Orbiters could be set aside for the far more important Surveyor series. Surveyor, it turned out, was critically important because until one actually landed on the Moon’s surface, no one was quite sure what they would find there. In the 1950’s, Thomas Gold, an Austrian-born astrophysicist and professor of astronomy at Cornell University, speculated that the lunar regolith (the powdery dust that covers the entire lunar surface) might be as much as 10 feet deep in some places, making a safe landing on the surface well-nigh impossible. Gold later revised his assessments, and his revised prediction of the depth