5. Leaping on the Moon: an Esoteric Symbolism
Prior to the Apollo
missions, it was an item of popular discussion to imagine the
fantastic athletic feats that man could accomplish on the moon.
Why, in 1/6th the gravity, a 180 pound
man would weigh only 30 pounds. He would be able to leap much
taller, run faster and farther, hit golf balls off the tee for a
mile. This line of discussion was hammered home in children’s
Weekly Readers in schools, in
television and film documentaries, in science fiction movies and
novels, on late night talk show monologues and in almost every way
conceivable. By the time of the Apollo missions, we were
well-prepared to see some truly stupendous things.
But as William Brian
II notes, we saw no such fantastic feats as we were glued to our
television sets watching Apollo astronauts on mission after mission
leaping around on the lunar surface.
Even with the astronaut gear....(Apollo 16 astronaut John Young) should have been able to jump over six feet off the ground if the Moon had one-sixth of the Earth’s gravity. In actuality, his efforts lifted him at most 18” off the ground.... Observations...indicated that Young made several attempts to jump as high as he could but with no success in achieving a height of more than 18 inches.604
This fact
corroborates the implications of Von Braun’s statement concerning
the neutral point of gravity between the Earth and the Moon,
indicating yet again that the gravity of the Moon is much more than
the public has been told.
And this in turn has
led some revisionists to maintain that the entirety of the Apollo
missions were hoaxed and done on a television mock-up set. But in
fact, the small heights achieved by the leaping astronauts on all
those Apollo landings in my opinion is a strong indicator that we
went, and that, in this instance at least, NASA concealed nothing.
Had NASA wished to hoax the missions on a television stage or film
set, it is hardly likely that it would have overlooked the obvious
implications of leaps from astronauts that were far too short for a
Moon with 1/6th the gravity of the
Earth. So why the leaping at all? Why show everyone on Earth in the
plainest possible fashion that the Moon is a much more massive
object than our pre-Apollo science had led us to
believe?
I believe in part
that the answer to this lies in the fact that, if the Moon is more
massive, then the likelihood of us getting off the Moon by means of
the small rockets on the Lunar Excursion Module is very small.
Rockets may have been adequate to the task of getting us there, but
if, as our and the Soviets’ earlier probe failures had already
indicated, the Moon’s gravity was already known to be more massive,
then the leaping is a subtle but nevertheless definite signal that
some other technology may have been in play in getting us off the
Moon.605
But there may be
another message altogether in the
leaping exercises of the astronauts on the Moon, a message heavy
with esoteric significance: leaping is associated with Mars, the
“Great Leaping One” of so much esoteric literature. Indeed, the
imperial Roman Salii priests who celebrated Rome’s founding
relationship with Mars did so by blowing trumpets and leaping.606 So perhaps the
leaping of the astronauts is designed to convey both a scientific
significance, and a ritual one. In this
respect, it has often been pointed out that many of the Apollo
astronauts were Masons, and actually took Masonic regalia with them
on their Moon missions to perform Masonic rites on the lunar
surface, rites that were never broadcast to the public. And as
Face-on-Mars exponent Richard C. Hoagland has often pointed out,
many of the space missions of NASA are oddly scheduled so as to
fulfill certain astrological and celestial alignments.
It is not only the
behavior of the Moon that is odd, it is also the behavior of our
astronauts on it.