Who Knows if the Moon’s a Balloon?

This investigation of our nearest celestial neighbor is unashamedly influenced by a book title in my library during my formative years — David Niven’s autobiography The Moon’s a Balloon.

The phrase actually comes from an e.e. cummings poem:

who knows if the moon’s
a balloon, coming out of a keen city
in the sky–filled with pretty people?
(and if you and I should

get into it, if they
should take me and take you into their balloon
why then
we’d go up higher with all the pretty people

than houses and steeples and clouds:
go sailing
away and away sailing into a keen
city which nobody’s ever visited, where

always
             it’s
                  Spring) and everyone’s
in love and flowers pick themselves.

One of my earliest memories, I think I was about 4, was when the editor of our hometown newspaper was visiting and asked me if I could see the Man in the Moon — to which I quite haughtily replied that there was no such thing, it was just the shadows cast by the rocks and craters.

The next day he published a humorous editorial about our conversation noting that “kids these days” don’t fall for silly stories about the Man in the Moon.

Hmmmm…

So just what did our forefathers believe about the Moon?

That question lead me to the Great Moon Hoax of 1835.

Considered the original “fake news” story, it started with a series of six articles printed in the fledgling New York Sun about the discoveries made by the famed astronomer Sir John Herschel with a monstrous telescope set up at the Cape of Good Hope.

The stories created a public sensation with their descriptions of a habitable white sand Moon populated by furry winged humanoid creatures who mated in the open, made grand structures and had domesticated bison-like creatures and uni-horn goats.

It created such a buzz that papers around the world picked up the series and hired illustrators to interpret the descriptions of our Lunar neighbors for their readers.

I kid you not!

Turns out that Sir Herschel’s assistant did not write the articles as claimed, but it is a firm fact that Herschel had a telescope at the Cape of Good Hope where he searched for evidence of Lunar life.

He even called the anticipated Lunar inhabitants Selenites, a term later coined by H.G. Wells in his popular series The First Men in the Moon originally published in The Strand magazine in 1900.

Seems Sir John’s father, William Herschel — a famous astronomer who discovered the planet Uranus (originally named after him) — shared his son’s speculations that intelligent life existed on the Moon and discussed the issue with contemporaries like Franz von Paul Gruithuisen .

Consequently, when the readers of a new 19th century penny daily discovered this “supplement” about Herschel’s report from the official sounding Edinburgh Journal of Science, it was a while before the findings were even questioned!

Eventually the story was debunked by a rival newspaper and the author identified as Richard Adams Locke, the co-publisher of The Sun, although he denied it for years. In his obituary they called the Moon Hoax “the most successful scientific joke ever published.”

The story was told with a minuteness of detail and dexterous use of technical phrases that not only imposed upon the ordinary reader but deceived and puzzled men of science to an astonishing degree.

Interesting to note that Edgar Alan Poe claimed the story was plagiarized from his 1850 short story The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall about a man who inadvertently flew to the Moon and sent a letter back to Earth describing Lunar life.

Since Locke was Poe’s publisher at the time, the claim doubtless had some merit.

Despite the debunking, the public remained fascinated by the subject and snapped up 60,000 pamphlets that elaborated on the hoax!

By 1865, Jules Verne had written From the Earth to the Moon which  referenced the Moon Hoax and fed the public’s continuing fascination with Moon Men.

Then things took a really weird turn.

In 1894, respected engineer and amateur astronomer Hanns Hörbiger had a vision of the Doctrine of  Eternal Ice that showed him how the entire cosmos is composed of ice in various states of disintegration.

According to his vision, the icy Moon(s) were regularly captured by the Earth’s gravity until they began to shed off frozen shells, laying waste to huge sections of Earth with ice showers followed by meteors of iron.

The Moon before ours, the “Tertiary Moon,” caused most of the dramatic events recorded in mythology ~ this includes the sinking of Atlantis. The Moon for the most part is comprised of ice and rock and our Moon Luna is only the latest of a series of Moons that have been captured by Earth’s gravity over the course of the ages.

Each successive Moon orbits a spiral path drawing gradually closer to the Earth, until it eventually breaks apart and showers the Earth with huge masses of ice and rock, causing great upheaval upon the Earth.

The catastrophic earth quakes, floods and glacial conditions following the downfall of the Tertiary Moon forced the Aryan-Atlanteans to migrate eastward over the ice bridge.

After WWI, the Cosmic Ice concept was heavily promoted by the National Socialist Party as the German antithesis to the Jewish theory of relativity.

The W.E.L. supporters believed that “Our Nordic ancestors grew strong in ice and snow; belief in the Cosmic Ice is consequently the natural heritage of Nordic Man.”

No effort was spared in popularising the theory: “cosmotechnical” societies were founded, which offered public lectures that attracted large audiences, there were cosmic ice movies and radio programs, and even cosmic ice journals and novels.

Curiously, when examining the evidence of periodic Mudflood catastrophes, it often appears as though entire regions, especially the Hyperborean Polar Continents, have experienced a major ice event.

I remember being taught there was no water on the moon, but now they speculate there are up to 100 million metric tons of ice lurking in the craters of the Moon’s poles — and they are planning expeditions to harvest the ice!

Hmmmm…

So, back when I was in college taking astronomy courses I saw a book titled “Our Mysterious Spaceship Moon.”

I remember laughing out loud and buying the cheap little paperback while telling myself this was one theory that was going to be impossible to believe.

Instead, I found myself rather impressed by the logic behind the artificial hollow Moon concept, especially the findings about the Moon’s structure which didn’t match up with our current explanations of Lunar geology.

For instance, the instruments left on the Moon indicate that it rings like a bell when struck by space debris (or man-made satellites).

Also, despite the size of the impact craters, none of them go deeper than 3-4 miles — indicating a uniform protective coating inside the sphere.

“Even CONSERVATIVE estimates by scientists indicate that meteors 10 miles or more in diameter should have penetrated the Moon’s surface to a depth of 4 or 5 TIMES that diameter; yet the deepest Moon crater we know about (the Gagarin Crater) is 186 miles across but less than 4 miles deep.”

So naturally, I asked my astronomy professor if he could explain these  curious findings. He responded that there were no easy answers to my questions and I didn’t need to worry about them since they weren’t covered in his curriculum.

Well, that didn’t satisfy my curiosity one bit and made me wonder just what else might be glossed over in my formal studies.

Actually, there was another book in my library called You Will Go To The Moon that I contemplated a lot as a kid.

It came with a collection of Dr. Seuss books — which even at a tender age I found strange.

I mean, what was this science book doing packaged in a fantasy series?

I think I get the joke now, though.

Admittedly, my hopes were reinforced when 10 years later in 1968 Stanley Kubrick released 2001: A Space Odyssey so the public (and the Apollo astronauts) watched it right before the “real” moon shot!

I saw that movie 11 times before it left the theater on the first run and read every scrap of material published about it since.

I even had this poster on my wall…

No doubt the movie left me with the impression that Earth/Lunar travel was just around the corner.

I watched the Space Race build as I grew up, ready to cheer on the human conquest of the Moon and line up for my ticket!

Although the concept was exciting, I admit I found the actual Apollo missions and astronauts pretty damned dull.

I barely noticed in 1972 when they stopped the Moon shots. I don’t think anyone realized at the time that it was really our last Lunar excursion.

Then I started noticing how instead of advancing us into space, NASA seemed pretty content to piddle around in near-Earth orbit and fantasize about how cool it would be to go to other planets.

Hey, we already did that, right? What’s the big deal?

Hmmmm….

So I broke down and considered the evidence that there had been a fake American Moon program. They say it was pulled off by Mr. Kubrick — the very man who convinced my generation that a civilian shuttle to the Moon was totally plausible!

The clencher for me on the whole fake Moon landing question was the exhaustive research by Dave McGowan, a talented challenger of quackadamia who also possessed a wonderful sense of humor.

His series Wagging the Moondoggie not only tackles the hard questions but pokes great fun at the space program in the process.

Highly recommended if you need a good laugh at the absurdity of it all while learning how the illusion was managed.

Here’s a sample:

Had the Apollo program been a real space exploration endeavor, the first manned flight of the Saturn V would obviously have gone no further than low-Earth orbit, as had been planned. This would likely have been followed by an unmanned flight to the Moon, and then possibly a flight ‘piloted’ by a dog or some other such mammalian life form. But taking logical, methodical steps toward achieving goals in space was for those pussies over in Russia. America was going to take the John Wayne approach.

Then there is another theory I also ponder proposed by the Dark Journalist.

He thinks that we DID go to the Moon, but we used X-Tech to get there and faked the public landings for political reasons.

That would explain how some of the human artifacts (like those reflectors) got on the Moon if the Apollo missions were a bunch of bunk.

D.J.’s theory goes that NASA is just a puppet show to distract the public from the Nazi scientists and technologies brought into the US through Operation Paperclip and Operation Lusty which have subsequently been co-opted by government (and private) black budget programs.

The testing of this technology led to the rash of UFO sightings since the 1940’s, most notably the Roswell incident (apparently the REAL focus of Joseph McCarthy’s Senate Hearings).

Now David Icke has stepped into the debate with his theory that the Moon is a Matrix.

Icke believes that the Moon is an interdimensional, interdensity portal for entities and energies from other dimensions. He believes that aliens use the Moon as a home base for hijacking signals from the universe so that our bodily forms that are experiencing this virtual reality on Earth, can’t fully experience what our creator meant for it to be.

If you’ve ever read Doris Lessing’s Shikasta series, the idea that the Earth is being blocked from the SOWF (Substance of WE feeling) isn’t a new concept.

And what about the persistent witticism that the Moon is made of green cheese?

Well, no one knows where it started, but the joke has been around thousands of years and has consistently been used to indicate how gullible people (and animals) can be about the Moon.

Obviously a ridiculous concept, but still so firmly fixed in our vernacular that the Business Insider thinks its worthy of a little “what if” clip!

Of course, NASA can’t resist the urge to poke fun with this fake picture from the Hubble telescope proving the Moon was made of cheese because they found the expiration date!

It was released on April 1, 2002. Very funny.

And last but not least, I still don’t get the weird math coincidence that somehow magically aligns the Earth, Moon and Sun to create perfect, predictable eclipses.

I know the quackademic explanation, but it doesn’t compute in my cosmos.

I suspect the dance between these three celestial bodies is governed by forces we have yet to comprehend.

So whenever I see the Moon hanging out in the sky, the only thing I’m relatively certain of is that it’s not just a inert hunk of rock put into a tidal lock around Earth by random gravitational forces.

I’m also having a tough time with the story about how we got to the Moon and why we can’t go back…it all seems quite dodgy!

Will future generations consider us as gullible as we (now) consider our forefathers who fell for the (first) Great Moon Hoax?

All I can say is after all that research, I still can’t laugh off the question:

What if the Moon’s a Balloon?

More speculations on sky phenomenon:
The Sky is Falling — The Chicken Little Conundrum

More hollow planet theories at
The World(s) Within Our World.

~ by weewarrior on September 20, 2019.