.
“Secrecy was of the essence,” said the legendary astronaut. “NASA had to fool a lot of important people for the plan to succeed, so it was a strict need-to-know approach to everything. They had to keep a lot of people in the dark.”
“I’m sure they had to, but how can you keep such a monumental task secret with so many people involved.”
“One would ordinarily think that something like that would be more complicated than it really is. But it’s all about compartmentalization of information. Segmentation of labors. No single person had the whole picture. You tell people only what they absolutely need to know in order to do their part, embellish it with a little bit of fiction and everything looks like business as usual. Everybody did what needed to be done under false but believable pretenses. This was done masterfully, and as a result, only a handful of people had the whole picture.”
“And you were one of them?”
“As commander of the mission with the most complex and important secondary protocol, I was made aware of much more than the average astronaut. The same applied to Buzz and Michael. Our mission was by far the most extensive and risky with a high-profile dimension upon our return to Earth. Still, I’m sure there were a few things we were not made privy of.
“See, the secondary protocol was different for every Apollo mission. Each one had to either test or place a component of the whole plan. Only the commanders were aware of the whole picture. They would brief their crews on the details once the previous mission was concluded and it had become official that their own mission needed to implement the secondary protocol. But those briefings were limited to the extent of their mission. They did not include any information regarding the role of other missions.”
“In November of 1968 America elected Richard Nixon as their new President,” said Lucas. “That must have thrown a curve on the secondary protocol plans. How was that handled?”
“The powers behind the plan chose not to inform President-elect Nixon for two very important reasons. First, plausible deniability, and second, he was the person that would oversee the landings on the Moon. It was important that he believed everything was for real. That way his actions would convey the highest degree of credibility to the world. Remember, for the governments of the U.S. and the Soviet Union, the space race was more a political endeavor than a scientific one.
“Anyway, besides the astronauts in the missions that carried out the secondary protocol, nobody knew about it outside a very small group of the highest top brass at NASA, plus LBJ and his most inner circle, and, I suspect, one or two Senators as well.”
“What about mission control? How would you train for a secondary protocol without the collaboration of someone there?”
“That’s an example of the compartmentalization of information I mentioned earlier. Over at Mission Control, the people developing simulations worked on scenarios pertaining to the secondary protocol without knowing they were generating the basis for a ruse. Since the secondary protocol was designed around the transmission of false but realistic data to Earth, the creation of such data could be concealed within the regular parameters of the development of regular training exercises. To the people working on simulations these were just more situations we had to train for. Little did they know that those streams of data they were creating were going to be used by the astronauts to transmit false data to the ground during secondary protocol missions.”
“So, does this transmission of false data included the video purportedly showing mankind’s first landing on the Moon?”
“Yes, it does. A very small team sworn to secrecy worked on the production of the simulated transmissions of us on the Moon. NASA fed them the cover story that they were creating some training films. And that the videos were deemed classified because of the Cold War. They used doubles for the filming which meant that no astronaut ever put a foot on a filming studio. Just like with President Nixon: plausible deniability. I can say under oath that I never participated in the filming of any fake Moon landing video, blah, blah, blah.
“Anyway, to further minimize the probability that the production house could identify their material in the transmissions from the Moon, their videos where heavily edited and the images degenerated using the videotape technology of the era. Someone, I don’t know who, made several generations of the final edit until it reached the grainy look you saw on those transmissions.”
“So, conspiracy theorists had it right when they said the whole thing had been filmed on a stage…” said Lucas.
“They did, but they struck out when they took that to mean that we never landed on the Moon,” replied Armstrong.
Over on the playing field:
The Indians once more started the inning well with a double to center but, just like before, the effort was fruitless. No score for either team in the second inning. Reds leading 1-0 after two.
Please help keep the stories flowing…
