Posted on 08/27/2009 12:47:29 PM PDT by Liberty Valance
AMSTERDAM (AP) -- It's not green cheese, but it might as well be.
The Dutch national museum said Thursday that one of its prized possessions, a rock supposedly brought back from the moon by U.S. astronauts, is just a piece of petrified wood.
Rijksmuseum spokeswoman Xandra van Gelder, who oversaw the investigation that proved the piece was a fake, said the museum will keep it anyway as a curiosity.
"It's a good story, with some questions that are still unanswered," she said. "We can laugh about it."
The museum acquired the rock after the death of former Prime Minister Willem Drees in 1988. Drees received it as a private gift on Oct. 9, 1969 from then-U.S. ambassador J. William Middendorf during a visit by the three Apollo 11 astronauts, part of their "Giant Leap" goodwill tour after the first moon landing.
(Excerpt) Read more at themonitor.com ...
It is red, with organic looking serrations.Moon rocks are all igneous (lava) and generally gray in color.
Uh oh, I’m starting to think the moon rock arrowhead given to me by one of the Apollo astronauts isn’t really from the moon.
There’s wood on the moon?
Of course. What do you think the whalers make their harpoons from?
(unfortunately, I wasn't able to find a good link to a video of "Whalers on the Moon" from Futurama in the minimal research I was able to do during lunch time)
ROFL!
Until global warming killed them all off and turned the moon into an arid wasteland.
It is all Bush's fault. Bush and those damned SUVs.
Women and minorities hardest hit.
File under Roo, the old switche-! Looks like someone grabbed the original and put this fake in its place, maybe many years ago, and no one had noticed until now. Spectacular!
That doesn’t look like any other moon rock I’ve seen. Why did it take forty years for somebody to notice?
As a kid, I also remember a picture in the newspaper showing some NASA officials in Taiwan with a box of moon rocks, given as a present to Chiang Kai-shek. Maybe we ought to check and make sure those rocks are authentic, too.
Of the 6 Apollo missions that landed on the moon Apollo 11 spent the least time and collected the least amount of lunar material. Each subsequent one I think spent more time on the moon and collected more so Apollo 17 rocks should be the most numerous.
I once heard that the moon was loaded with energy potential. Is there any truth to that? Does anyone know?
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