Transcript
A (0:01)
Want more Haunted Cosmos? Then make your way over to Patreon, where you can get early access to our content as well as exclusive content and regular dusty tomes and monthly live streams with Brian and myself. Plus, right now we're running a special offer 90% off of your first month. You heard that right. So go to patreon.com haunted cosmos and sign up now. This episode is brought to you by Jake Muller Adventures A thrilling Christian Audio Drama.
B (0:57)
654321 and God made the two great lights the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night and the stars. Genesis 1:16 the light in the desert sky faded. It wasn't yet fully night, but the sun was gone. In its wake lay a tide of pale blue, and a full moon glowed silver in the east. It was enough to see by, though one sight was easily deceived. Long shadows crawled across the desert floor like the tentacles of a kraken, and cacti stood like fuzzy mannequins, tricking one into believing he was being watched. A breeze moved just enough dust for one to hear it buzzing as it slid across the ground and whispered through the trunks and branches of a scrub oak. There were no people in that barren basin save two a man and his scribe. The year was 1946, and though it was the desert, the winter cold and lack of sunlight made the air sharp and biting. Everything felt expectant, as if the world around the two men was waiting for something profound to happen. The scribe sat on a rock a short distance from the man and opened his pad to record the proceedings. The man drew a circle in the sand, removed his boots, and stepped inside. He knelt and lifted his eyes toward the moon. After several focused breaths, he began to chant in Enochian keys, the esoteric language of the angels. Still gazing upward, he traced Enochian forms into the sand with the pointer finger of each hand. Then, abruptly, he stopped. The wind was swirling faster now. The scribe looked skyward and recorded flashes of light, supernovae bursting in the night. Echoes of laughter and answering divinities drifted through the wind, an unseen audience waiting to witness what would come next. The man knelt again and, taking up the chant one final time, engaged in rites of magic that need not be described here. Rest assured he performed them. Rest assured the scribe recorded them, and rest assured it seemed to both men that the celestial choir responded favorably. Left breathless and weak, the man rose from the sand and looked toward the scribe. The wind slowed to a whisper and the world resumed its ordinary form. The scribe was inquisitive he couldn't help but ask if it had worked. In reply, the man gave a tired smile and a nod of pure relief. Weeks of long and difficult magic were done. They had succeeded. The two drove out of the Mojave and back to their compound in Pasadena. Waiting for them, there was a newcomer who called herself Marjorie Cameron. The man greeted her with elation, for though she did not know it, he knew that she was the manifestation of his success only minutes prior. The incarnation of the scarlet woman. Babylon, the elemental from the stars who would conceive and bear his child, a moon child, a God child, born for the ascension of mankind to his place among the heavens. The man's name was Jack Parsons, and his is a strange story. Born in 1914, Parsons was raised in a broken but affluent household. When he was just an infant, his parents divorced, forcing him and his mother to live with her parents in their mansion outside Pasadena, California. This mixture of dysfunction and privilege made it difficult for the young Parsons to relate to others. He was dyslexic and thus perceived as dull, and his refinement made him the butt of countless jokes accusing him of being effeminate. Needless to say, he had no friends his own age for many years. What he did have were household servants who evidently cared deeply for him. Their coddling gave him room to cultivate his imagination and with it, his fascination with science fiction and rocketry. Eventually, Parsons formed what was likely the strongest friendship of his life with the boy named Edward Foreman. The two could not have been more different. On the surface, Parsons was wealthy. Foreman came from a working class family. Parsons was small and unathletic. Foreman was physically formidable. What they shared was a mutual obsession with exploration and things that went boom. They bonded over rockets, missiles and airplanes, trying to decipher their mechanics and wondering what else might be possible. At school, Foreman defended Parsons from bullies. After school, Parsons experimented with gunpowder and rudimentary rockets while Foreman watched in fascination. Even into high school, the pair kept the same routine. As they matured, so did their experiments. Parsons continued to raise the stakes in his rocketry, eventually tinkering with new fuel mixtures. This led to a growing expertise in chemistry that revealed his keen intellect to those around him. He began to fit in a little more, which was good for him. But through it all, Foreman remained his closest friend. Also in high school, Parsons developed a deepening interest in spiritualism and the occult. It's doubtful even he could have predicted the strange places these two seemingly opposed pursuits would ultimately take him. In 1931, amidst the great Depression, The Parsons fortune finally began to dwindle. Jack, still a young man, was forced to find weekend work. He landed a job at the Hercules Powder Company, a chemical and munitions manufacturer. The job not only let him contribute to his family's needs, it also let him scratch his itch for rocketry by immersing himself in the chemistry of fuel and propulsion. After a short time there, Parsons completed construction of his first solid fuel rocket engine. A few years passed. In that time, Parsons dropped out of two universities, both for financial reasons, while maintaining his job at Hercules. Then in 1934, he and Foreman attended a Caltech lecture featuring Austrian rocket engineer Eugene Sanger and a PhD student named William Bolle. Afterward, the friends approached Bolle to ask if he might aid them in developing a liquid fueled rocket engine. Already overextended, but Bolay referred them to another student, Frank Molina. The three, with Caltech's support, began industrious work on breaking the limits of contemporary rocketry. Everything was coming together now for Parsons, but few understand just what it meant. You see, Parsons interest in the occult never waned. On the contrary, it grew until it rivaled his passion for science fiction and aerospace. In his final years of schooling, these three loves merged into a kind of grand unified theory for Parsons. While others marveled at his uncanny instinct for complex rocketry, he confessed that at times during his occult rituals, he felt as though higher powers, interplanetary powers, were impressing secret knowledge upon him. These same forces, he believed, were urging him not only to build a liquid fueled rocket, but to send it beyond Earth's orbit into the heavens where they dwelt. Thus, the so called moon child he sought to create with the goddess he summoned. That night in the desert was far from disconnected from his rocketry. They were intrinsically linked. His occultism drove him to the stars. And in driving him there, it drove an entire nation as well. For Parsons succeeded in building that liquid fueled rocket. In doing so, he, he helped convince the United States to embark upon its journey into the final frontier. That's right. Much of the inspiration and potential for mankind's venture into space can be traced back to the enigmatic occultic genius of Jack Parsons. The man who believed we must reach the stars because the beings beyond them were calling us to come. All of it provokes the question, if that is the backdrop of mankind's great space race, should we have tried to go at all? What is the moon? Well, it's the lesser light made by God to rule over the night. A light for signs and seasons and days and years. But what does that mean? Certainly it's a conglomerate of materials possessing real mass. It evidently exerts a considerable influence on the Earth, governing tides, shaping weather patterns, and producing minor gravitational bulges. It shields our world from space debris that might otherwise strike her. All of that is true enough. But is it purely physical? Definitely. Maybe Perhaps even likely. Then again, could it be something more, something truly strange? In the days of the prophets, the moon was often described with apocalyptic language. At the very least, it serves as a symbolic harbinger of God's judgment, a sentinel in the sky whose shifting phases rhyme with the ever shaking foundations of the Earth. It is a signpost of divine Providence, pointing the world in whatever direction the heavens decree. The early Church fathers found in the Moon an image of the Church itself, a lesser light reflecting the true light of the risen sun upon a world still shrouded in the darkness of sin. Some took this further, imagining the moon as a kind of angelic figure keeping watch over the Earth. After all, if the stars can fight God's wars and sing his praise, Job 38:7, then perhaps the moon can do the same. Or so they wondered. This idea was expanded during the Scholastic period, when thinkers like Aquinas began to suggest that since man's dominion ends at the bounds of the Earth, the moon belongs to the first layer of the uncorrupted heavens. To men like Thomas and Albert Magnus, the moon was a silver gem of heaven that, in her effulgence, reminded God's people of the bliss awaiting them after death. The reformers, not disregarding the Scholastics, but adding their own insights, recaptured the moon as an image of the Church. Calvin was particularly struck by the words of Psalm 72, which promises that the fear of the Messiah will endure as long as the moon throughout all generations. In those words, he heard an echo of Christ's assurance to his disciples that the gates of hell would never prevail against his Church. A thread running through all this thought comes from Aquinas, who said that the realm of the sun, moon and stars, being outside of man's dominion, remains unaffected by the curse. That is fascinating enough on its own, but one of its implications is even more so. If the moon belongs to the untainted heavenly chorus, could it, the lesser governor of the sky, be governed itself by some kind of angelic? Speaking personally, I've often wondered whether there might be an angel of the moon. Now it's pure speculation, of course. Yet one reason I find the idea compelling is that it helps reconcile the moon's ubiquitous corruption in pagan religion. Nearly every ancient culture had a goddess of the Moon. Consider the Greeks. In ancient Greece, the priests saw the moon in three basic full, waxing and waning, and ascribed a different goddess to each of those forms. Selene, the peaceful and radiant embodiment of the full moon, ruled when the orb was at her brightest. Under her influence, the world was reminded of virginity's almost sacerdotal nature. In the waxing phase, the night was ruled by Artemis, the huntress and goddess of the harvest. Under her gaze, mothers prayed for fertility and blessed childbirth. Finally came the waning power of Hecate, goddess of witchcraft, night and crossroads, a power of decay and death with little blessing to be found in her. Together, these three goddesses formed a feminine tri unity within the Moon's orbit. Surely a corruption of the truth if ever there was one. Of course, a false idea does not necessarily imply a true one made of the same or similar substance. But perhaps in this case it does. Even so, the scholastic claim that the Moon remains untouched by man's corruption raises a more immediate if that's true, is it even possible for man to reach Luna's height? Jack Parsons would certainly say it's possible and that it must be done. But we have seen enough to call his judgment into question. So really, what should Christians think of it all? At 9:32am on July 16, 1969, a Saturn V rocket ignited its engines and lifted off from Cape Canaveral, Florida. Inside were three men made up the crew of the Apollo 11 mission. Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, and Buzz Aldrin. The Saturn V remains the only vehicle ever to carry human beings beyond low Earth orbit. Armed with three engine stages and fueled by a liquid chemical mixture that evolved from Jack Parsons earlier work, it stands as the most impressive piece of aerospace technology man has ever produced. Less than three minutes into the Apollo 11 flight, the first stage engines shut down and were jettisoned while the second stage engines fired. Just over six minutes later, those engines cut off and the third stage ignited. Thus, the three intrepid explorers broke free of their homeworld's bluish glow and entered the void of the heavens. Collins, pilot of the Columbia command module, performed the burn that slingshotted the crew around Earth toward their interception point with the moon. With the burn complete, Collins separated Columbia from the Saturn V's final stage, turned it around and redocked with the lunar module eagle. Apollo 11 had cleared its first major milestone. They had successfully left Earth and her orbit and were speeding through the vacuum of darkness toward their halfway point. Three days later, Columbia arrived at the Moon. All three men gazed out of the small window at the barren wasteland beneath them, pitted with craters, plateaus and canyons. The Moon stared back with apathy. The Gatekeeper of Earth was about to become a park for three mere men. Collins burned the engine to slow Columbia until she fell into lunar orbit. For him, it was time to wait. For Armstrong and Aldrin, the real test was just beginning. As the vessel orbited the moon 30 times, Armstrong and Aldrin performed systems checks on the lunar module. Each time they passed over the surface, both men looked down and spotted their landing site far below, a blank slate of gray in a sea of alien tranquility. Finally, with all her preparations triple checked, their moment arrived. On July 20, at 5:44pm Eastern Standard Time, Neil Armstrong separated Eagle from Columbia. Collins watched as his two companions hurtled down to a new world while he waited alone, falling ceaselessly through space. Five minutes into the descent, and only 6,000ft above their lunar objective, Armstrong and Aldrin discovered they were moving too far west. They informed mission Control back on Earth that they would surely miss the planned landing site by dozens of miles. Mission Control did not consider it an issue worth correcting, told the men not to worry. Both men happily obliged. When the time came to land, however, another problem arose. The landing computer was targeting a heavily uneven boulder field at the rim of the crater. Armstrong and Aldrin knew this would endanger both their ability to land safely and to relaunch toward Columbia. Armstrong made the brave decision to assume manual control of Eagle and guide it to a safer zone. With dwindling fuel reserves and a Houston crew sweating through their shirts, Aldrin called out data to Armstrong while he guided Eagle onto the lunar surface. Once the engine shut off, Aldrin famously quipped, the Eagle has landed. In reply, CAPCOM Charles Duke in Houston said, roger, you got a bunch of guys about to turn blue. We're breathing again. Thanks a lot. With those words, the Western world erupted in the ecstasy of accomplishment. Frail mankind had come together, built a craft once reserved for harebrained sci fi writers, flown it off of the surface of the world, landed it on another place, utterly bereft of life and unknown to all humanity. But still, the story was not over. In the following hours, the men prepared themselves and the Eagle's cabin for depressurization. At the start of this prep, Buzz, Aldrin partook of private communion on the moon. He was an elder at a Presbyterian church in Texas. Just before he had radioed Houston and encouraged everyone there and all those watching at home to pause for a moment and contemplate the events of the past few hours and to give thanks in his or her own way. Eventually, the time came. Helmets wore on, suit systems were operational, and the satisfying hiss of decompression sounded as they took one small step for man and one giant leap for mankind. Those fateful steps were nothing short of transcendent. Before them lay an endless beach of dead gray, pitted with bulbous scars and textured with scree and talus that had not moved nor felt even the slightest breath of wind for thousands upon thousands of years. It was as still as anything could be, and it was quieter than either man knew what to do with. Were it not for their communications with one another in Houston, the sound of their own breathing in that emptiness might have driven them mad. Far away, an umbra of total darkness stood ready to swallow them on the moon's far side. No penumbra waited in between. All the while they basked in the unabated radiation of their own star. Were it not for the millimeters of pressurized fabric around their bodies, they would have exploded and cooked in a hellish mixture of cold and heat. It was into this unworld that Armstrong and Aldrin now walked, and their species watched from the comfort of their distant home. For the next two and a half hours, the astronauts explored. They collected samples from the lunar surface, installed instruments to measure seismic activity, took photographs, enjoyed a phone call with President Richard Nixon, and planted an American flag two inches deep into the regolith. Before reboarding Eagle, Armstrong uncovered a plaque on the module's descent ladder that would be left behind. It displayed Earth's eastern and western hemispheres and read, here men from the planet Earth from first set foot upon the moon. July 1969 AD we came in peace for all mankind. With these tasks done, the men activated Eagle's life support systems. While they disrobed, they tossed much of their moonwalking equipment into the landing hatch to lighten the ascent module. Then they closed the lower hatch, repressurized the cabin, and settled down for sleep before takeoff. Over 21 hours after landing, Eagle's ascent stage ignited and rose victoriously from the surface to rejoin Collins and Columbia in lunar orbit. For nearly a day, Collins had been the loneliest man in the universe. During each of his 11 orbits around the moon, 48 minutes were spent on its dark side, cutting him off entirely from Mission control. Despite his stated feeling of exaltation, in those times of solitude, one imagines he was comforted to watch Eagle drift toward him through the Black Sea. Before long, Eagle docked, Aldrin and Armstrong reboarded Columbia, and their beloved lunar module was jettisoned into orbit, where it possibly remains to this day. The night before their scheduled ocean landing, the Apollo 11 crew made a final television broadcast. Each man expressed his gratitude for what was nearly complete. Collins remarked, all you see is the three of us, but beneath the surface are thousands and thousands of others. And to all of those, I would like to say thank you. Thank you very much. Armstrong ended his thanks by saying, we would like to give a special thanks to all those Americans who built the spacecraft. To those people tonight, we give a special thank you. And to all the other people listening and watching tonight, God bless you. But it was Aldrin's words that perhaps best captured the moment's affection. The Presbyterian ruling elder said, this has been far more than three men on a mission to the moon. More still than the efforts of a government and industry team, more even than the efforts of one nation. We feel that this stands as a symbol of the insatiable curiosity of all mankind to explore the unknown. And thus the broadcast ended. The following day, Columbia blazed through Earth's atmosphere and splashed down safely in the Pacific Ocean, about 13 nautical miles from the USS Hornet, the designated recovery vessel. The three men greeted the rescue team with smiles, entered quarantine for 21 days, and then emerged to cheers from a world that now considered them mythical heroes of the modern age. Apollo 11 had done it. America had done it. We had sent men to walk on the surface of the moon, and even more impressively, we had brought them back again. What's more, much of the mission was filmed and broadcast live to an eager Western world. There were witnesses to this, the greatest and most gilded capstone achievement of Western civilization. But there's a problem. It very well could be that none of this ever happened, or at least not in the way we've been told. Almost before the Apollo 11 crew had landed, naysayers claimed it was all a hoax. As the years wore on after this mission and others, in fact, the sixth and final manned mission to the Moon ended 52 years ago, almost to the day that we sit and record this episode, conspiracy theorists cited numerous reasons to doubt the credibility of NASA's claims and footage. In recent years, these hoax claims have gained fresh traction for one simple We've never gone back. How is it, some ask, that we had the technology to walk on the moon in 1969, but not today? It's a fair question. One would think that even setting aside issues of funding and congressional approval. 56 years of aerospace development would make space travel easier and cheaper. Yet it seems that this isn't the case. So what really happened in that summer of 69? Have we gone to space? Have we gone to the moon? Well, in this episode of Haunted Cosmos, we intend to find out. Ben, have you heard of the Jake Muller Adventures?