5/13/2011

Associated Press

Orlando, Fl, USA — NASA Archivist Harold Morrow is a rational man, and he will probably remind you of that at least 5 times during a normal conversation. Some people would say that that sounds like he is overcompensating, and he says he probably agrees with that. “But it’s not that I’m crazy. That’s not what I’m compensating for. I’m compensating for the fact that I’m saying things I know damned well sound crazy.”

That might be a subtle distinction, but it’s one that is very important to Mr. Morrow.

Harold knows the company he’s going to be keeping from now on, whether he likes it or not. UFO fanatics, Illuminati conspiracists, and Moon Landing deniers. “Oh, God, the Hoaxers. I hate them more than anyone else, because at least the other popular conspiracy theories are built around inventing fantastical ideas. That’s the only one I can think of that focuses specifically on making the world a more boring place — that works actively to deny obvious facts, instead of inventing ridiculous ones”.

But, just to be clear, Harold does neither. He’s not denying the truth of the moon landings, or any other well-established historical fact. Nor is he trying to push an imagined scenario on anyone. He openly admits that he has no explanation, rational or otherwise, for the curious phenomena he has been patiently documenting and (in a few cases) observing himself. He is, in fact, doing exactly what he always does — archiving facts and evidence, without passing judgement.

But those facts and evidence (assuming one accepts that that’s what they are) are more than a little bizarre, which is what makes Harold worry about his reputation and, possibly, his sanity.

“It comes down to a simple question: What is wrong with the Apollo 11 Footage?”, says Harold. “‘Nothing’, is what most people would say. Or, more likely, ‘What?’” He gives self-deprecating laugh at that; he’s gotten that response quite a bit. But it doesn’t change the way he feels. “Something is wrong. I don’t know what, but I’m going to keep collecting evidence until I find out what it is.”

This pursuit (or, as some might say, obsession) began in 1998. Harold was in the middle of a massive archival project in preparation for the 30th anniversary of Neil Armstrong’s famous first step, and on one of his rare nights off he was talking to his uncle David about the event. David had been a young man barely out of high school at the time, and (like almost anyone old enough to remember it) he had vivid memories of that moment. But he also remembered something else. Something very strange happened to him that day. “David is not the kind of guy to make up crazy stories, but this was a weird one,” says Harold.

“First of all, you have to understand that David is an avid hunter. Has been since he was old enough to fire a gun; it’s just part of his family’s tradition. So the fact that he had a handgun on his belt while he was watching Neil Armstrong climb down the ladder is not at all unusual. In fact, I think he had just come back from a hunting trip; maybe he was cleaning his rifle while he was watching it.”

But what happened to him was definitely unusual. “I guess you could call it a blackout,” says Harold. “He remembers that opening line, the infamous flub by Neil, ‘That’s one small step for [a] man…’, and the next thing he remembers, his pistol was on the table, smoking, with a round missing from the cylinder. And he had that fluttery, anxious feeling in his stomach that you get after a fight or a good scare. In his words, ‘I felt like I had just been jumped by a Grizzly, and barely escaped with my life’.”

This probably would have lingered as nothing more than an odd family anecdote if it hadn’t been for Harold’s job. As part of his work on the 30th Anniversary Retrospective, he was interviewing people around the country about their memories of the Apollo 11 landing. “If I hadn’t heard David’s story first, I probably wouldn’t have noticed anything. But he set me in just the right state of mind to see these things — subtle behaviors from people I was interviewing. Sometimes they would tense up, almost imperceptibly, while describing their memories. They would often look like they wanted to tell me something else, but were just holding it back. A few people even started to mention something, but were cut off by their spouses or kids, like ‘OK, Dad, don’t make us look stupid by bringing that up again.’”

But Harold wanted to hear it. It wasn’t stupid to him, and he wanted them to know that he wouldn’t judge them or look down on them. “I was there to hear stories. And I wanted the real stories, not the sanitized Normal Rockwell crap. So I kept pursuing it.” And what he found painted an increasingly bizarre and disturbing picture — disturbing, more than anything else, for its consistency.

“That’s the really creepy thing about it. These are not just a handful of random blackout stories that can be explained away by epileptic seizures or too many glasses of wine. They follow a pretty clear pattern.” The template was defined by Harold’s uncle David, and almost all of the subsequent stories seemed to follow it.

The basic elements are pretty straightforward: A person would be watching Neil’s first steps on the moon, hear that famous “One small step” line, and would experience a sudden discontinuity in time. This short blackout would often be followed by objects inexplicably appearing out of place — a baseball bat, a tire iron, a kitchen knife, sometimes a firearm with a round or two missing. And those present often reported physical symptoms following the event; symptoms indicative of severe physical and emotional stress consistent with a massive release of adrenaline. And it wasn’t just the night of the landing itself; these incidents seemed to repeat — sometimes from the same individuals — on subsequent viewings of the video.

“It’s like this footage was scaring the hell out of people, but they had no idea why and not even any memory of being scared.”

After collecting enough evidence, Harold decided to take the chance of bringing it to the attention of his supervisors. “I felt like an idiot, but I just couldn’t ignore it anymore, and I had to let someone know.” What was the response? “Silence,” says Harold. “Total silence. In a way, that was the scariest thing about it. It would be a lot more reassuring if they had laughed in my face and told me to take some time off.”

For now, after an initial flurry of activity, the trail seems to have gone cold. Harold has found it increasingly difficult to find new information on this topic, but he has two more interesting data points to fit into this still poorly-formed narrative. The first one is that the number of incidents seemed to be primarily concentrated in the first 5 years after the Apollo 11 landing. “They tapered off pretty dramatically after that. There have been occasional reports since, some as recent as the mid ’90s. But those are extremely rare.”

The other discovery may constitute the only shred of corroborating physical evidence Harold has discovered to date, although it is pretty weak and — consistent with everything else in this story — very strange. “It’s the length of the video,” says Harold. “It doesn’t match observation times.” Asked to clarify, Harold describes the discrepancy thus: Find video footage of Neil Armstrong’s first step and watch it from beginning to end while counting the time in your head. Compare the time you count with the displayed length of the video. “I can almost guarantee that they won’t match. Not only will they not match, but the difference is surprisingly consistent — about four to four and a half seconds. Not too many people have done this experiment, because it takes some time and it’s so strange that most people don’t see the point. But almost every time someone has done it, the results have been the same.”

So what does this mean? “I have no idea,” laughs Harold. “Truly; I don’t even have a guess. It just makes no sense whatsoever.”

So this takes us back full-circle to the original question: What is wrong with the Apollo 11 footage? Has it been doctored somehow? Is something missing, or has something been added? “I just don’t know,” admits Harold. “I know this seems like I’ve wasted a lot of time for no result, but I just can’t shake the feeling that there’s something there that we need to know about. And I’m just too invested in it at this point to give up.”