Bret Sheppard, the satellite dish on the Moon, and the meaning of "acquisition"

        Bret Sheppard was invited for a long interview on something called Spaced Out Radio last night. He gave an insight into his motivations, and more important for me, his misunderstandings. He related how, as a young art student, he stayed after class one day to hear a presentation by someone from the Stanford Research Institute. He thinks now it must have been in connection with Ingo Swann's remote viewing experiments, that were ongoing at the time. Something about a photograph taken on the Moon impressed him sufficiently that he became something of an expert in the strange field known as "lunar anomalies," and he spent literally years, off and on, scouring Apollo photography. Then he continued...

26:54 "I almost gave up. I almost said "Know what? I'm done with this lunar garbage." I was in there getting all of the anomalies out of them. You know... basically, the reason why I was doing that was to eliminate them from what I was seeing in the image that I remembered when I was 15 years old. You know, so that's what I was doing. And I was hitting a wall because I needed a control image, and the first image I got was actually from Donna Hare.^{note 1} And she had, er.. I wanna tell this right... she had gotten it out of the Dempsey Dumpster as part of her portfolio. She was allowed to keep that as part of her portfolio. So she had a few.. you know, mostly Apollo 12 images. You know, from Pete Conrad and Alan Bean. And this... this particular image showed the LEM and a satellite dish on the horizon of the Moon. And.. and there's Surveyor in the foreground, and Alan Bean posing next to Surveyor. I believe Pete Conrad was taking the picture. So...um... basically this ...what this image showed me... it was very clear, much clearer than the NASA image that they put on line. I mean, wiki-clear, you know. It was like "Wow! That is a picture!" So, there was this satellite dish in the background. You know, that they couldn't possibly fit in the LEM."

        Well, he must be referring to either AS12-48-7135 or AS12-48-7136, because they are the only shots showing Al Bean beside Surveyor 3.

        As for the satellite dish--well, could it be the S-band antenna that the astronauts erected as soon as they got off the ladder? Here's the actual Apollo 12 dish:

         "They couldn't possibly fit it in the LEM." Sure they could..

Ken was like a father to me
        A little later, Bret got around to talking about his association with Ken Johnston and the whole issue of the (non-existent) 16mm film of crater Tsiolkovsky shot by Ed Mitchell on Apollo 14. The topic of this blog from 19th March. He said he was living in Texarkana, in a house that was falling down, when he met up with Ken. He said Ken was a role model, "like a father to me." Some kind of deal was struck whereby Ken helped Bret move to Belen, NM in return for his and Karen Patrick's help finishing Ken's autobiography.

33:00 "The thing was, that there were a couple of issues with it... with the story. He didn't know at the time what... ahhm... what mission he saw that 16mm film. And so one of the things that I decided to do was to investigate his story. Thoroughly, you know. So anyway I started getting attacked by James Oberg and everything else, for even attempting this. So what I found was... James Oberg said that they never flew over Tsiolkovsky crater. And semantically he's right--the Command & Service Module never really flew over Tsiolkovsky crater, near it, or whatever. They never really filmed except I found a 70mm shot of Tsiolkovsky crater showing the exact sun angle that Ken was talking about from memory. And then, I found out that there were two 16mm cameras in the Lunar Module, and one in the Command Module. [He's right about that] The one in the Command Module was sort-of pointed down and going really fast, skitching across the lunar surface. And it looks just exactly like that... skitching over the lunar surface and grabbing some film. This is the one that Oberg showed Ken at one of the conferences. And that really got me thinking "What did Edgar Mitchell film in the Lunar Module?"
...
I looked up the Apollo 14 onboard voice transcription, because they say everything in those, even when they go to the bathroom. They say everything. [He means the recordings made by the Data Storage Equipment while the astronauts were out of contact with Houston, on the back side of the Moon.] So I looked that up, and I scoured this ... data, you know. And what I found was...um.. that basically right inside this... this transcript, on... let's see. it's... er...on the third day, around 2:29 p.m. and 26 seconds, that's how detailed this is. [He's misunderstood the notation. 03:14:29:26 is the Mission Elapsed Time, not the time of day.] And the Data Acquisition Camera, the 16mm, er... Edgar Mitchell said "I'm going to see... I'm going to see that.. I'm all set up for this acquisition." That doesn't mean anything else but a camera."

        Well, he's totally wrong. It has nothing to do with the camera. They were on the far side, remember, out of contact. "Acquisition" means acquisition of the radio signal from Houston, as they come around the Moon. It was known in NASA-speak as AOS, for Acquisition Of Signal. This becomes totally clear very shortly, although Bret doesn't see it. He continues:

"And then it says minus 39 plus 325..  He said "OK, HIGH GAIN, MANUAL, and WIDE." Those are camera settings."

        Once again, he's wrong. Those are antenna settings, required to get the best possible radio contact. If Bret had continued reading from the transcript, he would have seen this immediately following: "And 6 minutes away from it." Yes, six minutes until AOS. Here it all is, from the actual document:

        And sure enough, a couple of pages further on, we see:

        Another of  Sheppard's misconceptions is that this conversation took place in the LM. Actually, undocking didn't take place until M.E.T. 04:07:47:58, so all three astronauts were still in the CM at that time. Here's the part of the CM control panel concerned with the high gain antenna:

        It's a little hard to see, but the leftmost switch is for antenna tracking. The mid position is for MANUAL. The next switch controls the beam width: up for WIDE, down for NARROW. The two large dials control the pitch and yaw angles of the antenna. Mitchell was reading from the Flight Plan: Yaw -39, Pitch  +325. Those angles are much clearer on the LM control panel.

 

       So that completely explains the above dialog--nothing to do with cameras at all. I don't want to be too hard on Bret Sheppard, but he just keeps revealing his ignorance of Apollo hardware and history. And honestly, if he thinks there is 16mm film of Tsiolkovsky, why doesn't he show it? If he thinks there's an alien base there, why won't he look at the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter image, which is 40 years newer and 0.5 meters/pixel resolution?

Update:
        Using Google Moon, OneBigMonkey has derived this simulated view representing what Ed Mitchell could see as he spoke the words "That's Tsiolkovsky. OK, I've got it." OBM set the altitude at 90km, somewhat below apolune. Very useful.

Tsiolkovsky is on the horizon. No view inside the crater is possible.


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[1] Donna Hare is an important figure in the mythology of lunar anomaly hunting. A so-called whistle-blower, Donna was actually employed on image processing for NASA JSC and alleges that one of her duties was to airbrush out alien structures.