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Transception Incorporated, self-described as an Austin, Tex., based psychic R&D operation, sent a letter to NASA Administrator Charles Bolden that nominates the Apollo 16 crew for the Congressional Space Medal of Honor.
The medal is being recommended for astronauts John Young and Charles Duke allegedly coming upon an extraterrestrial "shipwreck" on the surface of the moon during their third lunar surface excursion on April 23, 1972. A prerequisite for the award is that the crew is "released from secrecy" about what they really saw on the moon.
A variety of "shipwreck elements" -- described as "structures, people/aliens, biological technology, and their plight" -- were reportedly seen through a psychic technique called remote viewing by six experts at Transception.
The "wreckage" suspiciously looks a lot like just a big boulder, dubbed "house rock." And, you'd expect to find big boulders on the edge of an impact crater.
Simply look at the high resolution images from the public-accessible Apollo archives. A photo mosaic of the alleged spaceship (shown below) is either a boulder or a fossilized alien vehicle.
The alleged crash site, as seen in the Lunar Orbiter photo, is pretty bland-looking for a purported disaster location. It's like looking for a capsized cruise liner and just seeing a shoal of rocks.
If you listen to the audio transmission, the astronauts should get an Academy Award for acting instead -- if the conspiracy theorists are right. The crew never says "holy cow! look at that spaceship!" Instead, they say, "look at the size of that rock!"
Besides the Apollo photos, you can easily go online and peruse LRO image of the Apollo 16 landing site and go looking for the alleged spaceship on the rim of North Ray Crater.
But wait! As is typical of any pseudoscience, when reality doesn't fit the far-out claims, true believers turn to paranoid allegations of government cover-ups, monolithic global conspiracies and media censorship.
Supporters of the crashed spaceship tale say that NASA simply deleted the evidence from the Apollo 16 photos (and they would probably say the same for the LRO data). Because the Apollo images are recorded on photographic emulsion, not digital data, manipulating them would be no small trick.
Photo trickery allegations are a convenient back door for conspiracy buffs that is big enough to sail the Titanic through.
The group says that a psychic technique called remote viewing allows people to take an armchair visit to other planets. The mind-travelers draw images of alien-looking things that are supposedly transmitted from a definitely out-of-body experience (potentially) millions of miles from Earth.
In the 1960s, when psychoactive drugs became widely popular, I assumed that claims of tripping to other worlds were purely imaginary. Consider this remote viewing experience reported in a discussion forum:
"...I relaxed in my chair, and pointed myself up there. I saw 6 or seven aliens looking right at me grinning and smiling. they had red eyes like the reddit alien but no antenna. As soon as I saw these creatures I immediately felt hurt ..."
The roots of remote viewing can be traced to several U.S. Government sponsored parapsychology studies from the 1970s to 1990s. When funding was canceled in 1995, an executive summary concluded that the remote viewing test results were at best "vague and ambiguous."
Government involvement (and gullibility) alone doesn't legitimize what is clearly a pseudoscience that ranks alongside astrology, ghost hunting, and "telekinetic" spoon-bending.
As with any pseudoscience, there are no physical underpinnings to the outlandish claims of remote viewing. In other words, no natural particles or fields capable of carrying information into the human brain, independently from the five senses, have ever been quantitatively measured in a physics laboratory.
And, as is typical of a pseudoscience, remote viewing claims contradict fundamental physics such as the speed of light barrier and causality.
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