California Woman Who Tried to Sell a Moon Rock Wins Round Against NASA

Joann Davis had a moon rock. Yes, it was real. A gift, she said, from Neil Armstrong to her late husband.

She also had an ill son and the Lake Elsinore resident wanted to help with his medical care. So she contacted NASA about her intention to sell it.

That led to a nightmare situation on May 19, 2011, when Davis stood in the parking lot of a Denny’s restaurant in pants soaked in urine, answering questions from a federal agent about a rice-sized piece of moon.

“He kept saying, ‘You will be going to federal court, you will be going to federal jail,’ ” Davis said Friday.

An indignant federal appeals court on Thursday criticized Davis’ detention by NASA agent Norman Conley in the Denny’s parking lot, calling it “unreasonably prolonged and unnecessarily degrading.”

Conley detained Davis even though he knew she was nearly 75 years old, had urinated in her pants during the sting, had reached out to NASA herself and was having financial problems, a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said.

The court was “determining whether a federal agent could be sued for wrongful detention under these circumstances,” said Davis’ Redlands-based lawyer, Peter Schlueter. And their decision was “absolutely, yes.”

Lunar material gathered on the Apollo missions is considered government property, and her email prompted an investigation that brought six armed officers to the Denny’s that day in a sting operation to seize the rock.

Instead of asking Davis to surrender the rock to NASA, Conley “organized a sting operation involving six armed officers to forcibly seize a lucite paperweight containing a moon rock the size of a rice grain from an elderly grandmother,” 9th Circuit Chief Judge Sidney Thomas wrote.

Then why didn't the Russians.... beat ... them (to it)?

Both countries faced the difficulty of traversing the van Allen Radiation Belt. The Russians (sans a home-grown Hollywood talent hotbed) presumably dealt with the problem while bathed in reality.

Given that the Americans--seeking merely the optics of a cold war advantage (with that Hollywood piece in place)--had less of a "requirement" to face reality, they faked it till they could make it.

One wonders with such an achievement "six times in the bag" without a major failure why the Americans haven't been back for a manned moon flight, or any other manned destination, be it a celestial body, or even merely traversing beyond the van Allen Belt (~1000 to ~2600 miles) in the meantime. Forty years on, couldn't a lot of money been made flying rich people to the moon and back with such a well-proven vehicle by now?

..And Stolar... invocations of God, Nazi-isms, or next of kin do not an argument make. History has shown that hundreds of thousands if not millions of people can be simultaneously deluded by propaganda.

The shielding that would have been required to protect three astronauts from the Van Allen Belt radiation was estimated to require an inch thick of lead (or the equivalent) all around. There is no way even the Saturn V rockets could have handled that extra weight to achieve orbital-, let alone escape -velocity to the moon.

Since essentially the same vehicle was used for all the Apollo program launches, if Apollo 11 could not have done it--and they amply proved through imagery trickery that they couldn't even plausibly fake having done it--none of the Apollo missions went to the moon.

Lots of crazy government hacks are out there (and here, too) spewing nonsense and wild theories just to allow the unwashed masses to pejorize others, but that's just disinformation. Many honest seekers of the truth are people with very knowledgeable backgrounds. I believe FR has a reasonably good percentage that fit into that category (or I'd not be here).

“Finding the occasional straw of truth awash in a great ocean of confusion and bamboozle requires intelligence, vigilance, dedication and courage. But if we don't practice these tough habits of thought, we cannot hope to solve the truly serious problems that face us - and we risk becoming a nation of suckers, up for grabs by the next charlatan who comes along.”-- Carl Sagan

If we're not up to this difficult task (Sagan's challenge), some group could do something really awful, like set off nukes in the American homeland, while blaming undocumented Guatemalans or some such (false flag). Then the unthinking (remaining) masses would overwhelmingly welcome a New World Order after millions died off in the total economic stagnation, eh?

No, but it's a well-known fact that it's easier to fool people than to convince them they've been fooled.

There was sufficient technology in 1969 to fake it in video, but the skill to do it well enough to keep it hidden for more than a couple of decades was lacking. The guy in the video is merely spouting unsupported opinions. I was there doing video in those days, too.

To conflate, then exchange the complexity of an Apollo mission with the effort he would have had to take to stage a fake is the height of arrogance. He's puffing himself up unreasonably.

The guy's assumptions about many of his waxed-poetic complexities have to do with his assumptions of, for example, the necessity of continuous video. Discontinuities abounded, thus there was no such requirement of continuousness that otherwise would have belied a hoax. Dust on the film giving up a hoax? PFFFFFFT!

At least one reel of pre-recorded video was found among the tapes. That was dated when the astroNOTs were actually in low earth orbit (by the evidence of the tape shot out a port hole, even as things get in the way of the porthole (represented to have been filled by camera equipment, as below) when they were--per the necessary schedule--halfway to the moon.

I find that damning, as well as the misrepresentation of what is clearly a small portion of the earth's surface being represented as the blue marble while they're halfway to the moon. The cloud patterns on the earth-portion span--in coarse detail--from one end of the hemisphere to the other. Not plausible.
I found what the guy presented in the youtube thingie had a lot of holes and unnecessary assumptions. I don't think he addressed a particularly broad range of them problems that have been noted by others. He tried baffling with BS through a lot of it.

I have years of experience preparing video for high-end home theater trade shows. But this guy's assumptions seem to be mired in his own past experience's shortcomings... can't do this, would have to do that.. when those musing contain the assumptions of his past experience more than inherent necessities of how things had to have been done.

He doesn't deal well with many clear multiple shadowed photos. He doesn't deal with point light source reflections in deep shadows (that indicated a multiple light-source situation (see post #19).

He doesn't deal with the VA Radiation Belt. He doesn't deal with the single-shot accuracy, behaviors and choices that non-professional photographers (e.g., Armstrong and Aldrin) made throughout their moon experience.

Apollo AstroNOTS have made grossly varying statements about even whether they could see stars. Some denied being able to see any, others talked about all the glorious stars. Certain that fact would not occupy only one or the other polarity of that question, irrespective of the aperture of the lens at any given moment. All of them should have seen stars, but most would know there wouldn't be any on their film. Which way would they lie? Why didn't they talk about the difference of what they (should have been able to see)/saw, versus what they --in all their presumed photographic expertise would know could account for both. But no, we don't hear contemporaneous explanations like that. Instead, when faced with tough questions, we get Aldrin shouting to the camera, "We were passengers!"

There have been many, many anomalies in the "blue marble" (earth pictures), such as continents taking up grossly-different proportions of a hemispheric view.

Also, doctoring of the imagery, copying portions of one piece to another.

Something happened to those $6B of taxpayer dollars that went to the Apollo program, however. I suspect it kept a nice chunk of the Florida economy humming, doing (obviously, by deduction) not much more than make-work.

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