Apollo 18's Lunar Truth: Alternate History or Time Shift?

William Blake's I want! I want! (1793).

Over the past few months, one of the most popular posts on this blog has been this one, which I wrote about the movie, Apollo 18.  Now, the Space Review has recently dumped cold water all over the rampant Internet buzz about this movie, and questions as to why its revelatory website, Lunar Truth, was seemingly gagged online.  Nor are there any hints of self-deprecating ironic humour among conspiracy theorists as they search for something with a built in oxymoronic pun like 'lunar truth,' but I digress.  No matter what the critics say, space exploration and other major Millennial historical events remain topics where reality is constantly questioned.  If we one day settle Mars, I wonder whether there will be groups of people on Earth who believe the colonists simply are not there?

The Space Review level-headedly says:

The premise is that this film is actually a documentary based upon “found footage” that was kept secret by the government and then somehow leaked. That’s a concept with a long lineage, but it was really adopted by the horror genre starting with The Blair Witch Project in the late 1990s and continuing more recently with the Paranormal Activity films. In this case the viewer is told that the US government mounted a secret mission to the Moon in the mid-1970s (the Saturn V launch was disguised as an unmanned Earth orbital mission). ...

[T]here were several things that I liked about the film. One was the commitment to technical accuracy. The footage looks like an Apollo mission. The equipment is accurate, and the surface of the Moon looks like the surface of the Moon. Although this film was made on a shoestring budget, it looks good, even when it was made to look less than cinematic, like recovered documentary footage. The film therefore proves that if NASA wants to fake the Moon landings (again!) they can now do it on a reduced budget. That should make the politicians happy.

Another thing that Apollo 18 did well was remain internally consistent and logical. Once you accept the premise—that the United States flew a secret Apollo mission to the Moon—then the film holds up. In fact, the writers have been meticulous in their approach. At several points in the film a savvy viewer might wonder why something happened, or how certain plans or events occurred, and surprisingly the writers had thought of the answers.

For example, one problem with the “secret mission” story is that the Soviet Union should have known about it and would have gone public. The film’s answer to this is that the Russians did know, and in fact, had already flown a failed mission to the same location where Apollo 18 landed. Needing help, the Russians turned to the Americans and both sides kept the missions secret. Eventually the Apollo 18 astronauts stumble across the Soviet LK lunar lander and its dead cosmonaut. Another potential plot hole was the Command Module Pilot in lunar orbit. Why would he abandon his crewmen on the surface? The answer is that if he did not comply with orders from Earth, Houston would not send him the required guidance data to return to Earth. Clever, sophisticated storytelling, based upon the actual Apollo program. ...

The two men [who worked on the production] do provide some informative comments. They explain, for instance, that the movie was filmed in Vancouver and the computer generated effects were done in Russia. None of it was filmed with what would be considered conventional cameras, with much of the movie shot on 16 millimeter film to obtain the grainy documentary look that they wanted. Often the cinematographer would scratch the film prior to putting it in the camera in order to give it an aged, damaged look. ... 

Perhaps the most interesting story was that the original plan was for the “moonsters,” as they called them, to be large creatures. In fact, the script originally had one of the creatures attacking and damaging the Russian LK lander. But the initial CGI footage looked “silly” as one of the men said, and they decided instead to go with the small, spider-like creatures that we really only glimpse in the movie. That was certainly a good choice, and one of the creepiest aspects of the film comes when the rocky lunar surface starts to move.

Despite the dose of reality the film's DVD extras inject into the thriving conspiracies around the movie, the film remains convincing to many.  It successfully hit a nerve.

In another post, I discussed quantum physicists' theories about parallel universes and the impact of those theories on pop culture.  The article on which that post was based had an interesting comment related to the Apollo program.  The commenter felt that whatever went wrong with the Apollo program somehow felt like a time shift, or a parallel reality or alternate world shift.  He also felt that other major historical events, such as 9/11, had a similar resonance to them, sort of like history turned inside out.  This is perhaps a semi-rationalization of a typical sensation of cognitive dissonance during a time of extremely rapid technological change.

Also, people who witness huge, world-changing watershed historical events are aware that they cannot go back to the way things were before the event happened.  This tends to provoke anxiety and an emotional need to square the new reality with the old reality.  That is especially true if one feels that the new reality post-watershed is significantly worse than the pre-watershed reality, as with 9/11.  In those cases, conspiracy theories are more likely to arise to provide some seamless explanation of what went wrong, of where and why we took the wrong, fateful path.

At any rate, the commenter, Rick Carufel, said of the Apollo program:

Slipping
by Rick Carufel

I first became aware of slippage in the timelines with Apollo 13. I mourned the death of our brave astronauts and felt a personal loss when they crashed into the moon after being hit by a micro-meteor.

I feared it would be the end of manned exploration of space. But we moved on and even returned to the moon a few times.

One day I awoke to find a truly disorienting situation. It seemed that the entire world had been reversed or mirrored. Left was right, and right was left. This perception faded after a few hours, and I wrote it off as a particularly bizarre dream.

Then I became aware of the fact, mentioned on some TV show, that Apollo 13 had actually made it back, with everyone safe. That just blew my mind. I began to question my memory.

How could that be? I distinctly remembered the crash report with Walter Cronkite crying on TV stating that the mission was lost and had crashed into the moon on April 15, 1970. Now, a decade, in 1981, later I am watching a show telling of the extraordinary mission and how they had miraculously survived.

The second time I noticed a timeline slip or modification was similar to the first. Again I awoke with the distinct feeling the world had mirrored on me. Again the feeling passed in a few hours, and everything seemed normal again. But again history seemed to have been resetting.

This time it was the case of Nelson Mand[e]la. I had gone to bed with the memory of Mand[e]la having been an anti-apartheid activist in South Africa and having died in prison, in 1978 under the Botha Regime. I awoke, in 1994, turned on CNN, and was shocked to see Mand[e]la was the leader of South Africa. Quite an accomplishment for a dead man.

Now I was convinced that something highly unusual was happening. I decided it was time to start taking notes since the Apollo 13 event had for some reason entirely vanished from my memory until the second event happened, and I remembered. I suspected that this sort of thing may occur more often than I remembered, with some events simply going totally unnoticed. I was now on the alert.

The most recent incident happened on 9/11/2001. Again, I woke with the feeling of a reversal of polarity, of the world. The night before I had gone to bed and Al Gore was our new president. He had won the election by a small margin, and I distinctly remember his speech, claiming victory, and Bush's speech congratulating Gore on the win. I remember the inauguration and him running the country for several months. But on 9/11, I turned on CNN, and there was Bush, as president, saying that the World Trade Center had been hit by 2 planes. This was fully 10 minutes before the second plane had hit! There may have been a double timeline modification on that day.

I had heard over the years about the Philadelphia Experiment and strange doings going on at Montauk on Long Island. I had read the "Time Machine" by Wells and "A door into Summer" by Clarke, so I was aware of the possibility of time travel, at least in theory. I soon became aware of two distinct types of time travel, after extensive research on the Internet.

The first type of time travel is particularly dangerous, that is, travel through a single timeline. This is the type of travel that can change history and create paradoxes.

The second type is safer; it entails traveling to parallel timelines or nearly identical universes. This type of travel does not change history or create paradoxes. One never actually travels to or from the same timeline so not problems are created. Michio Kaku has expounded the string theory of the multi-dimensional universe, and John Titor sure has a convincing story of traveling from 2036 to 2000. His info hasn't been wrong yet. Both these men are advocates of the multiverse.

So now I was faced with the question of what was happening, in light of this new info. Was someone traveling through a single timeline and altering it? Was the world itself slipping from one timeline to another? Or was I somehow, spontaneously slipping through the timelines? Or could some government or corporation be tampering with time, just because they figured out how to do it? Perhaps it's a natural phenomenon that has always happened and only now with world-wide communications it is detectable.

These questions have not been answered to date, so I patiently wait for the next paradigm shift of reality, to explore further the nature of these occurrences.

I often wonder if I am mad and delusional, but the images of the changed past are firmly imbedded in my memory. I intend to do further research to try and unravel this conundrum. Recently I have heard rumors of a time vortex over the South Pole. I will try and contact someone who has witnessed this phenomenon. It is said that if a balloon is floated up into this vortex with a watch attached, it comes back down with the watch reading six hours earlier than when it ascended.

In the meantime, I will wait for the next event to occur. What do you think is going on?

Perhaps there's a reason the Apollo missions have attracted so many conspiracy theories, percolating anxieties, and wavering realities. For millennia, the moon was the symbol of mystery, of the Underworld, of dreams.  In the film, The Year of Living Dangerously, one of the characters remarks that there is an Indonesian saying that 'water from the moon' is something that you can never have.  Perhaps going to the moon, making it tangible, is impossible to reconcile on some level in the human imagination.

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