Some ham radio enthusiasts say yes
2/24/2000
The View from Marrs by Jim Marrs challenges bureaucratic secrecy and the status quo. Big Media watch out!
U.S. astronauts have indeed experienced strange things in space. Why then haven't they talked more about these experiences? Have they been ordered to keep mum?
One account of how the astronauts were muzzled came from an ex-NASA space program member, who accused his former employer of censoring transmissions from Apollo 11 and other missions by switching to radio channels unknown to the public. He claimed that unnamed ham radio enthusiasts monitored Apollo 11 transmissions after the astronauts landed in the Sea of Tranquility and overheard one of the astronauts exclaim, "These babies are huge, sir....enormous...Oh, God, you wouldn't believe it! I'm telling you there are other spacecraft out there...lined up on the far side of the crater edge...they're on the moon watching us."
Binder's account of an unexpected welcome wagon on the Moon was dismissed out of hand by all but the most credulous UFO researchers. However, a variation on this story was repeated by Maurice Chatelain in his 1978 book Our Ancestors Came From Outer Space. Chatelain wrote, "When Apollo 11 made the first landing on the Sea of Tranquility and, only moments before Armstrong stepped down the ladder to set foot on the Moon, two UFOs hovered overhead." He added, "...the astronauts were not limited to equipment troubles. They saw things during their missions that could not be discussed with anybody outside NASA. It is very difficult to obtain any specific information from NASA, which still exercises a very strict control over any disclosure of these events."
It would be easy to dismiss Chatelain as quickly as Binder, except for the man's credentials. Chatelain had every opportunity to know what he was talking about, since he was in charge of designing and building the Apollo communication and data-processing system for NASA. Since coming to the United States from French Morocco in 1955, Chatelain established a reputable career in the aerospace industry. He was in charge of engineering new radar and communications systems for Ryan Electronics in the late 1950s, receiving 11 patents including an automatic radar landing system used in the Ranger and Surveyor moon flights. He began working on the Apollo project after joining North American Aviation.
Chatelain acknowledged that NASA had the capability to hide secret Apollo transmissions among a wide variety of radio channels. "When Apollo arrived within proximity of the Moon, the communications carriers previously used could not reach that far, so all communications went through one single, very powerful, transmitter with a directional antenna in the S band, between 2,106 and 2,287 MHz (megahertz), with a great number of channels, each transmitting several signals at the same time through multiplexing. For instance, there were seven channels to feed medical information about the physical condition of the astronauts, nine to retransmit the stored telemetry data from the passage behind the Moon that could not be beamed directly," he stated.
Further evidence of NASA's willingness to hide information from the public came from Representative Howard Wolpe of Michigan who in the early 1990s reported that congressional investigators discovered a two-page set of instructions to NASA administrators advising how to avoid disclosing "controversial" information. According to Wolpe, "This NASA document instructs government employees to: 1. rewrite and even destroy documents 'to minimize adverse impact'; 2. mix up documents and camouflage handwriting so that the document's significance would be 'less meaningful'; and 3. take steps to 'enhance the utility' of various FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) exemptions." A NASA official, unsurprisingly, said the document was a 'misrepresentation' of NASA's policy of openness.
The space agency not only had the capability to suppress UFO information, but also used it, according to Dr. Garry Henderson, a General Dynamics researcher who worked with NASA. He said astronauts are under strict orders not to discuss UFO sightings with anyone. They are, after all, military officers susceptible to military justice if they reveal secrets.
Add to this the power of secret intelligence agencies, some with much more clout than even the CIA. As Don Ecker, research director for UFO Magazine, pointed out, "Sitting behind all this is the National Security Agency (NSA), which monitors all transmissions and screens all footage taken on missions."
The refrain of censorship was recently joined by Brian O'Leary, a scientist-astronaut during the Apollo program and deputy team leader of the Mariner 10 Venus-Mercury television science group. "During the late 1960s while I was a NASA astronaut, I had no knowledge of astronauts' UFO sightings," O'Leary later wrote. "My enduring friendship with one of the astronauts who reportedly had a sighting did not seem to matter when I asked him about whether he had: He was conspicuously evasive. Have the astronauts been sworn to secrecy? Was this the main reason why all of us astronauts--civilians included--had to have top-secret clearances? If so, this situation has put the UFO observers into the hot seat with respect to the Government--not an enviable position." O'Leary revealed his sentiments, however, by repeating the story of a ham radio operator who reportedly picked up this transmission from a space shuttle flight in March, 1989: "Houston, this is Discovery. We still have alien spacecraft under observance."
In answer to the question of why NASA and the government would hide away evidence of extraterrestrial life, several researchers pointed to a NASA report done by the Brookings Institution in 1960. Titled "Proposed Studies on the Implications of Peaceful Space Activities for Human Affairs", the report stated, "While face-to-face meetings with (extraterrestrial life) will not occur within the next 20 years--unless its technology is more advanced than ours, qualifying it to visit Earth--artifacts left at some point in time by these life forms might possibility be discovered through our space activities on the Moon, Mars, or Venus."
The report added, "Anthropological files contain many examples of societies, sure of their place in the universe, which have disintegrated when they had to associate with previously unfamiliar societies espousing different ideas and different life ways; others that survived such an experience usually did so by paying the price of changes in values and attitudes and behavior." This caution was picked up by writers for The New York Times, which carried a headline crying, "Brookings Institution Report Says Earth's Civilization Might Topple if Faced by a Race of Superior Beings."
The idea seemed to be that the public should be protected from the startling news of extraterrestrial life to avoid panic and chaos. Over the years it must have become more and more difficult for the people in power to admit that they had mounted a cover-up. It was the old "one lie begets another" syndrome. What government official today would want to come forward and tell the American public, "Well, yes, we lied to you for more than 50 years about this topic"?