MONOLOGUE WRITTEN BY CLYDE LEWIS
A doctored video of President Richard Nixon delivering an Apollo 11 contingency speech is making its rounds online with its creators hoping to underscore the disturbing power of “deepfake” videos.
It took Massachusetts Institute of Technology whizzes more than half a year to create the 7-minute video which shows real NASA footage and then the president delivering a speech as though Apollo 11 had taken a tragic turn.
It is pretty convincing and yet it certainly is crude. It is there to make a point that anything can be faked and that it is dangerous to believe everything you see.
However, I also think that it is deep fakes such as these that certainly can harden the resolve of those who doubt that in 1969 we actually landed men on the moon.
The project,undefinedcalled “In Event of Moon Disaster”undefinedand hatched by experts with MIT’s Center for Advanced Virtuality, was meant to prove the dangerous influence “deepfake” videos can have.
“In Event of Moon Disasterundefined is an immersive art project inviting you into an alternative history, asking us all to consider how new technologies can bend, redirect and obfuscate the truth around us,” the creators wrote on the project’s website.
“By creating this alternative history the project explores the influence and pervasiveness of misinformation and deepfake technologies in our contemporary society.”
The experts said artificial intelligence technology called “deep-learning” was used to mimic Nixon’s voice and facial movements. The contingency speech, which is stored in the National Archives, was read aloud by a speech actor.
The MIT attempts at Deep faking the deaths of our Apollo 11 astronauts and the subsequent speech provided by well faked Richard Nixon should give everyone pause with regard to the credibility of the documentation of our future space programs where we are allegedly planning trips to the moon and mars.
This bit of theater had myself and my staff intrigued and inspired us to experiment a little bit with audio and we went a step further and created the entire situation from launch to crash and the reports from CBS news which include commentary by Cronkite, and a report from Dan Rather about what Werner Vaun Braun thought of the unfortunate deaths of our Apollo 11 astronauts.
Back in 2006, I reported on two stories that were released by NASA concerning moon dust or Regolith and how it would affect the machinery on the moon and how it would affect the astronauts. I reported it because I was most intrigued by the title on the NASA headline it read TRUE FAKES: Scientists Make Simulated Moondust.
I was curious as to why NASA needed to make fake moondust and so I read the story and was amazed at how frank it was about how NASA needed truckloads of fake moondust to be delivered in order to test how would affect astronauts and the machines they would use.
It was like they did not have the data from the 1969 moonshot - it was almost as if the moon landing never happened.
But this is not politically correct to question or have any doubts about whether or not the documentation of the moon landing was either doctored or fake in 1969.
It wouldn’t be out of the question that they could create a simulated landscape back in 1969 and put two astronauts or actors on the set to high five each other and take the rover for a spin – a rover that they neglected to study to see how regolith affected it in the first place.
The study with the fake regolith was conducted for a 2020 launch – now it appears that the program is now being pushed to 2030. I am sure that it will be pushed further that is if they are really trying to go to the moon.
But with deep faking, who knows what we can convince people of.
Today, it is of great novelty to deep fake the deaths of our heroic astronauts and warn people how technology is capable of faking just about anything.
And even though you are hearing Richard Nixon eulogizing the astronauts in a fake video – it really isn’t that hard with clever editing to convince everyone that in a different timeline an excited Walter Cronkite telling everyone of the successful launch to moon, could immediately become the grave messenger of the news that the Apollo 11 capsule impacted on the surface of the moon.
Or that the command module somehow exploded in the process—or even the idea that aliens fired on the astronauts.
Our space program is infallible, history says so. Science and the government backs it up and many Americans believe whatever their government tells them. Well, let me shine some truth among all speculation and theory.
The truth I want to reveal is about a space program that at one time was far superior to that of the United States. I am sure that there are a few reading this saying “There is no other space program more superior, we had the first man to walk on the moon.” Yes and believe it or not it is the only “first “that American space program can claim. Because everything else we did in our space program paled to what The Soviet Union was accomplishing.
In 1957, Russia was working on its space program and had no idea that they were part of some race for space. They merely studied and prepared their country for the next phase in their evolution. The United States was being devastated by Russian space breakthroughs. Using that bold American, spirit our government created a hypothetical “Space Race.” It was promoted and encouraged because Russia was the first to launch a satellite into space, an animal into space, and while we couldn’t even get a rocket off the ground or keep it in the sky for 5 minutes they were ready to go to the moon. The Luna-1 rocket was able to do a fly by over the moon snapping pictures and the Luna-2 was able to reach the moon and drop off communist chotchkies on the lunar surface.
In the United States we were still at the drawing board trying to figure out how to get a 3 pound satellite off the ground. Many of the rockets would just explode on the launch pad. They attempted a satellite launch with project Vanguard and it failed in 1959. Four months after Russia successfully launched Sputnik 1, The United States successfully launched Explorer 1 into space. The Russians had already launched the dog Laika into space, but she later died six hours into the flight.
The U.S. sent up monkeys and brought them back alive. The Russians had successfully sent a man into space and brought him back alive. The Russians sent rockets to the moon. The United States claimed they put a man on the moon.
Russia was flummoxed. How did that happen? How could it have happened? They were stunned. They were in the process of landing a man on the moon and they couldn’t do it. This was the so called space race. It was kind of like a fat kid showing up at the track, watching a toned athlete run several laps and then saying to him “I have been watching you run, and I can run too, I know you can run better than me, but I know I can beat you.” The athlete doesn’t take the kid seriously until he does win the race, A race the athlete didn’t want to run, but felt compelled to run just to teach the kid a lesson.
While everyone knows of the success of our moon landing, many do not know or are unaware of what Russia had done to get to the moon and back. As the race was getting heated, Russia kept many secrets about their space programs. According to conspiratorial history Russia actually had two space programs.
The program the public saw, and the darker more serious side where horrific things took place and cosmonauts would lose their lives for their country. The darker side of the space race is seldom spoken of. There are people who say that there is no proof that there were horrible accidents in space, however there are some stories that circulate in Russia and even in the United States about how it is suspect that we could land a man on the moon and successfully bring him back on our first try when Russia had tried and lost many men and women in the attempt.
Russia was unable to get a manned ship through the Van Allen radiation belts. The Van Allen Belt is an area of intense radiation 500 miles outside the earth’s atmosphere. Satellite circuits can be damaged unless they are shielded properly. Human beings passing through the belts would not survive unless heavily protected. Think for a minute about going to the moon. Think about how we were mere cave men leaving this sphere into a hazardous environment. The United States did it on the first try with no deaths or mechanical failures. They passed through the Van Allen Belt without incident and landed safely on the moon.
There is a legendary story of a cosmonaut that passed through the Van Allen Belt. Cosmonaut Valentin Bondarenko according to sources left this earth with white skin and returned with black skin. He was very much alive but with extensive radiation burns all over his body.
The only place where there was skin was at the soles of his feet where they injected him with pain relievers. While the entire case was kept secret until 1990 there are many indications that the ship also burned him on re-entry into the earth’s atmosphere. No one could even fathom the horrible torture that must have been inside a small capsule hundreds of miles from earth.
He died on the same day in 1961.
By April of 1965 a macabre article appeared in Readers Digest. The article had mentioned that mankind had a long way to go before landing on the moon. It explained that there is compelling evidence indicating that the Soviet Union was sending cosmonauts to their deaths in their quest to land a man on the moon and bring successfully back to earth.
The article literally confirmed for most people the “cold war” rumor that somewhere out in space is the frozen body of a Cosmonaut that failed in his mission to land on the moon.
.Today, it is a creepy thought that perhaps billions of miles from the sun a capsule frozen in time is drifting across the boundary of our solar system and entering into interstellar space. The Astronaut inside is perfectly preserved at -474 degrees Fahrenheit. The capsule is hurling through space at 18,000 miles per hour and has been doing so for nearly 50 years. Russian black operations were downright suicidal and in some respects a matter of legend, yet Americans go into space, enter into the hostile environment of the Van Allen belt and land a man on the moon on its first attempt.
Keep in mind that all other missions previously attempted by the United States were conducted with 200-400 miles in space then suddenly Americans made it to the moon 250,000 miles away.
There were all these “firsts” by Russia. Yet Russia has yet to land a man on the moon has anyone even wondered why this is the case? Even in a race the loser always finishes what he starts.
Many Russian Cosmonauts have said that the moon landing is impossible. The unfortunate thing is that American jingoists can say that this is all sour grapes and that these opinions are based in jealousy and nothing scientific.
However in the later 1990’s there were radio transmissions that were released to the public that were allegedly recorded by two Italian ham radio operators that intercepted radio signals from Russia indicating that several cosmonauts had died in space while attempting a trip to the moon.
We all know that history records that Yuri Gagarin was the first human in outer space and the first to orbit the earth but the radio signals allegedly paint a grim audio picture of lost cosmonauts forgotten by history and erased form the records of the Soviet Space program.
The Torre-Bert tracking station recordings produced by two Italian brothers in the 1950’s and 1960’s have been under scrutiny and some say that they are hoaxes. However it seems that for 40 years there was a cover-up about the Soviet space program and that many pilots had died in their attempt to orbit the earth and go to the moon.
The Pravda Newspaper finally acknowledged that there were holes is Russian space history and that the first man in space was not Gagarin but Vladimir Ilyushin who after failing in his attempt to orbit the earth crash landed in the Republic of China and was held there for some time. Ilyushin claimed that there was a secret flight before his in February of 1961 where a colleague lost consciousness and had a heart attack in space. The Torre-Bert listening station allegedly had recordings of the incident. The two Italian brothers Achille and Gian Battista Judica-Cordiglia claimed that in the recording you could hear the gasping of air and the last strained moans before the Cosmonaut died. Achille was also a cardiologist and claimed that the sounds of the thumping and gasping were those of a dying man. The brothers also claimed that they had recorded the sound of an SOS to the world. At first they claimed that what they had tracked was a satellite but through the static they were able to pick up an SOS signal that seemed to be moving away from the Earth.
In addition, they claimed to have recorded the voice of a woman named Ludmilla, who was returning to Earth in May 1961; in the recording she is said to have cried that “she was burning”. Ludmila is believed to be the first woman in space but there is no record of her only an alleged recording of a woman in distress falling to Earth.
If the Torre-Bert recordings are to be believed then there have been several attempts to orbit the earth and go to the moon. The first attempts were met with disaster. We only hear of Russian failures in space and mysterious recordings because it only makes our program look flawless. This in my opinion makes our claims about the conquering of space suspect.
It may have happened eventually but the doubts of a 1969 moon landing as pristine as it was with the same technology you find in a toaster oven is really hard to fathom.
It is a miracle, indistinguishable from magic – it is one of our biggest technological achievements and yet it gets a passing report in the media every year and July 20th has never been considered a holiday recognizing the hope that it gave the world.
