This last spring's Eurovision Song Contest had an interesting entry from Italy. A man in a clown costume sang a collection of disjointed thoughts, at one point saying, "E che le lune senza buche Sono fregature." (https://eurovisionworld.com/eurovision/2025/italy#google_vignette) That translates to, "And that moons without craters/holes are frauds."
I went back and looked at stills of the moon landing by Armstrong and Aldrin in 1969, and I didn't see any craters. I did see a dune in the background, which seems a bit odd since dunes form from the action of repeated gusts of wind; the moon doesn't have an atmosphere, so it doesn't have gusts of air that could form dunes.
I wasn't going to blog about this topic. Moon landing questions are heavily discouraged in our culture, and I do enough digging into less mainstream possibilities already. However, I think it is important to sometimes ask questions about things that seem to merit a few. A world where questions are off-limits is an ever more unpleasant place. And Italy practically begged the western world to ask a few questions about the 1969 moon landing!
I am blogging about the topic now because I was reading, how to, a book by the creator of xkcd. (If you have never read it, xkcd is a very clever comic that one often needs a background in math and science to understand. See https://xkcd.com/ .) In describing the aircraft that was used to carry the Space Shuttle orbiter around, the author of how to said,
To carry the Space Shuttle orbiter, the carrier aircraft has a special mount that protrudes from the top of the fuselage. This mount fits into a socket in the belly of the Shuttle orbiter. Next to the mount is an instructional plaque, which features the single best joke in the history of the aerospace industry:
ATTACH ORBITER HERE
NOTE: BLACK SIDE DOWN
My father worked in the aerospace industry--specifically on anthropomorphic tank suits for pilots at one point--on and off for decades, and I assure you that he never joked about this writing on the Shuttle orbiter carrier.
My curiosity raised, I looked up whether the Shuttle orbiter carrier really said that. There was a photo showing that it did. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shuttle_Carrier_Aircraft#/media/File:Shuttle_mounting_point.JPG .) The word "NOTE" was in red font, while the rest of the instructions were in black. I decided to try doing doubles-cancellation on the black font part of the message and got this result: trlakswn. I tried a few possibilities for reading it and saw that if one reads it backward, it is "nw skal rt" or "No-scale art."
"No-scale"? As in a reference to weightlessness? And then it was followed by the word "art", which can be the abbreviation of "artificial". What was going on at NASA that a hint of faked weightlessness somehow got painted on the orbiter carrier? Surely someone in the organization knew of the ever-present conspiracy theories about the space program and would have been careful to avoid feeding them.... Wouldn't they?
These are questions I will never be able to answer.
[Update 7/15/2025: It doesn't help simplify matters when a headline says the following:
The Pentagon Disinformation That Fueled America’s UFO Mythology
U.S. military fabricated evidence of alien technology and allowed rumors to fester to cover up real secret-weapons programs
Is that a tabloid headline?!
No, it's the Wall Street Journal, last month. See https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/ufo-us-disinformation-45376f7e, June 6, 2025. Hardly a wild-eyed news source.]
No comments:
Post a Comment