The Day the Music Died

On February 3, 1959, a small airplane crashed in a field near Clear Lake, Iowa. The pilot and his passengers, Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and J.P. "The Big Bopper" Richardson, all perished. It was the day the music died. "I can't remember if I cried... When I read about his widowed bride... But something touched me deep inside... The day the music died." (from American Pie by Don McLean) A group of rock 'n roll bands, known as the The Winter Dance Party, was in the middle of a three-week tour covering 24 cities in Wisconsin, Minnesota and Iowa. On February 2, they had performed at the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake and were scheduled to perform at the Armory in Moorhead, Minnesota, the following evening. Buddy Holly had grown tired of riding the bus and decided to charter a flight to Moorhead. There was room for three passengers in the single engine plane -- his two band mates, Tommy Allsup and Waylon Jennings. Richardson had the flu and asked Waylon Jennings for his seat on the plane. Jennings agreed to do it. When Holly found out about it, he told Jennings, "Well, I hope your bus freezes up." Jennings replied, "Well, I hope your plane crashes." Though the remarks were made in jest, Jennings was haunted by the incident for years. Richie Valens then asked Allsup for his seat. They flipped a coin. Valens won the seat and sealed his fate. The plane went down a mere five miles from the airport. It struck the ground at 170 mph. The three main attractions of The Winter Dance Party were thrown from the wreckage and on their way to rock 'n roll heaven. "And as the flames climbed high into the night... To light the sacrificial rite... I saw Satan laughing with delight... The day the music died." (from American Pie by Don McLean) But the show must go on. Dion & The Belmonts (the fourth headliner) and Frankie Sardo finished the entire tour, but Bobby Vee & The Shadows left the troupe after the Moorhead performance. Fabian, Frankie Avalon and Jimmy Clanton were brought in as the new headliners. Ronnie Smith took over as vocalist for The Crickets. Buddy Holly (1936-1959), singer and songwriter, was considered to be one of the pioneers of rock 'n roll. He's ranked #13 on Rolling Stone Magazine's list of 100 Greatest Artists of All Time. Ritchie Valens (1941-1959) was a Mexican-American (and part Yaqui Indian) from Los Angeles. His music career had just begun, lasting only eight months. His songs "La Bomba" and "Donna" were huge hits. J.P. Richardson (1930-1959) was a disc jockey, known as The Big Bopper. He had a rich voice and an exuberant personality. He recorded a song called "Chantilly Lace" and soon became a one-hit wonder. Having given up his seat to Richardson, Waylon Jennings (1937-2002) went on to become a successful country singer. He, along with Willie Nelson and Johnny Cash, started the "outlaw country" movement. Buddy Holly's revolver was found by a farmer plowing the field in April of 1959. An autopsy performed on the pilot and the Coroner's examination of the four bodies failed to find a bullet wound. On March 7, 2007, a forensic examination of the remains of the Big Bopper, requested by his son, put certain rumors of foul play to rest. A decade after the accident, Don McLean wrote and recorded the song AMERICAN PIE – the classic music tribute to Buddy Holly. The song is also a parable on how music changed in the 1960s with the loss of pure rock and the coming of non-danceable pop music (The Beatles, etc.) and folk music (Bob Dylan, etc.). American Pie was a stunning achievement in songwriting; layered with meaning, innuendo, and a fascinating historical perspective of a musical era. The rocking 1950s had ended and the helter skelter of the 1960s rolled in. Various interpretations of the lyrics of American Pie can be found on the Internet, from the obvious meanings all the way down to what Billy Joe McAllister threw off the Tallahatchie Bridge. "And the three men I admire most... The Father, Son and the Holy Ghost... They caught the last train for the coast... The day the music died." (from American Pie by Don McLean) Of course, the music didn't really die in the winter of 1959 -- it died when they invented Rap and Hip-Hop. On January 28, 2009, the 50th anniversary of the Winter Dance Party held a tribute concert in the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake, Iowa, where Buddy Holly, The Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens played their final concert. Sirius XM Radio host Cousin Brucie was the emcee. Some of the entertainers included Los Lobos, Graham Nash, Los Lonely Boys, Wanda Jackson, Tommy Allsup, Bobby Vee, Joe Ely and others. One of my old high school classmates named Greg, along with the ghost of Waylon Jennings, were in attendance. But I couldn't make it that year. I had an appointment to have my legs waxed. Bye, Bye Miss American Pie. ___________ Quote for the Day – "Yesterday is just a memory, tomorrow is never what it's supposed to be." Bob Dylan ___________ Bret Burquest is the author of 12 books. He lives in the Ozark Mountains with a few dogs and where music is a way of life. ___________ - -

Free at Last

Monday, January 17, 2022, is Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, the third Monday in January of each year. In 1955, at age 26, Martin Luther King, Jr. was thrust into civil-rights leadership in Montgomery, Alabama, after Rosa Parks had made her courageous stand not to move to the back of the bus. A group of blacks, formed by the community to lead a bus boycott, chose King as a compromise candidate to lead their moral crusade. • Immediately, King was besieged with threats. The Ku Klux Klan gave him three days to leave town. • He spent a night in jail for driving 30 mph in a 25-mph zone. • A bomb exploded on his front porch. But it only made him stronger. In April of 1966, I was drafted into the U.S. Army (Vietnam Era) and stationed at Ft. McPherson, Headquarters of the Third Army, in Atlanta, Georgia, whereupon I was one of a half dozen data processing analysts, working night shift, supervised by a civilian employee, coding documents to be processed by computer. On April 3, 1968, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. (MLK) was in Memphis, Tennessee, speaking to a capacity crowd of striking garbage workers and others at Mason Temple about the climate of racial hatred. King’s final words in his last speech were… “I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land. And I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.” At 6:01 the following evening, King was struck in the face by a rifle bullet as he stood on the balcony outside of room 306 of the Lorraine Motel. He was rushed to St. Joseph’s Hospital and pronounced dead at 7:05. Martin Luther King, Jr. believed in non-violent protest of racial injustice -- it cost him his life. He was 39 years old. Racial riots broke out that night in over 100 cities, including Detroit, Chicago, Boston, New York, Newark, Baltimore, Minneapolis, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Nashville, Kansas City, Oakland, Memphis, etc. On April 5, 1968, President Lyndon Johnson called out 4,000 federal troops to quell the rioting in Washington DC -- plus, 20,000 Army and 34,000 National Guardsmen had been ordered to anti-riot duty elsewhere. April 11, 1968, was my scheduled discharge date from the U.S. Army. However, King’s funeral was to be conducted on April 9 in Atlanta, just a few miles from Ft. McPherson. My expectations of becoming a civilian once again were temporarily put on hold. The entire world, including the Army, expected massive outbreaks of chaos during or shortly after the ceremony. Instead of packing to go home, I was in combat gear, practicing bayonet thrusts, wondering how much live ammo would be distributed for riot control. Lester Maddox, an outspoken racist who once chased blacks out of his restaurant by passing out axe handles to his white patrons, was the Governor at the time. He was furious that flags at state buildings in the capitol of Atlanta, and elsewhere, were at half-mast the day of the funeral. Surrounded by 200 armed state agents, Maddox proceeded to personally hoist the two flags back up, but backed off when the major TV networks showed up to record the action. This added mayhem gave those of us standing by with bayonets an extra sense of anticipation. The funeral service was held in Ebenezer Baptist Church. King’s casket was placed on an old farm wagon, with steel-rim, wooden-spoke wheels. 30,000 marchers were sent ahead to start the procession. An estimated 200,000 mourners took part in the procession that eventually passed directly in front of the Capitol. Governor Maddox, along with 160 helmeted troopers and 40 enforcement officers from other state agencies, remained inside the statehouse. There were eight armed men at each entrance. Maddox had given them the following orders: “If they should go so far as to break through the locked doors, then start shooting and don’t stop until they are stacked so high above the threshold the followers would be unable to climb over them.” The procession passed by solemnly and the funeral occurred without incident. Two days later, I was discharged from the Army and returned home to Minneapolis, where I kissed the ground and embarked on a new life once again. The human conscience is eternal and will never die. ___________ Quote for the Day – “A man who won’t die for something is not fit to live.” Martin Luther King, Jr. ___________ Bret Burquest is the author of 12 books. He lives in the Ozark Mountains with a few dogs and has many memories of Atlanta, Georgia, in the mid 1960s. ___________ - -

Edgar Cayce and Atlantis

There is a fine line between real and unreal. But if you look hard enough, the unreal becomes more real every day. Anthropologists once believed North and South America had initially been populated by Asians crossing a land bridge connecting Asia and Alaska during the last Ice Age, some 20,000 years ago. However, recent genetic DNA analysis of Native Americans now places the initial wave of migration between 38,000 to 50,000 years ago. Genetic DNA analysis can trace the ethnic tribal lineage, and thereby land of the origin, of a human being. Native American tribes contain four distinct DNA groupings, designated A, B, C and D. These groupings are found in Asia but not in Europe or Africa. While 96 percent of all indigenous natives in North and South America fall within A, B, C and D, there was a mysterious four percent, dubbed Group X, which could not be explained. Type X subjects were not found in the vast majority of tribes, including none in South America. It was also determined Type X subjects arrived in North America 10,000 to 38,000 years ago, later than the other groups. By far, the highest concentration of Type X in Europe was found in the Basques, a race of Caucasians who live in the Pyrenees Mountains between Spain and France. The highest frequency of Type X in the entire world was found in the Berbers, a race of Caucasians who live in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco in North Africa. The Basques and Berbers have long puzzled anthropologists, linguists and historians because they don't seem to fit into their continental surroundings. However, independent researchers of the Association of Research and Enlightenment (A.R.E.), followers of Edgar Cayce, have come forward and made a few observations of their own. Known as the Sleeping Prophet, Edgar Cayce (1877-1945) is considered by many to have been America's foremost psychic. Throughout his lifetime he performed over 14,000 readings while in a self-induced trance. Although delving into many subjects, 8,976 of his readings, transcribed onto 900,000 pages of notes, were devoted to medical problems, a majority of which were resolved, often advancing current medical technology. Cayce’s readings were always recorded by a stenographer. To do a medical reading on a subject, all Cayce needed was the subject’s pre-arranged location at the time of the reading. On one occasion, Cayce went into a trance and declared that the subject was not at the location where he was supposed to be at the time. It was later determined that the subject had forgotten about the meeting and was indeed not at the pre-arranged location at the prescribed time. On another occasion, Cayce was to do a reading for a ship’s captain who was at sea. When Cayce went into his trance, he realized the fellow could not speak English, so he did the entire reading in fluent German, a language he had no knowledge of when awake. Clearly, Edgar Cayce had a unique talent, although he claimed that everyone had the capability to do the same. In addition to medical inquiries, people would often slip in questions about the past or the future. An extremely high percentage of Cayce’s “predictions” of the future have come true. And now the genetic DNA analysis findings of Type X may actually lend additional credence to his psychic readings as well. Many of Edgar Cayce's readings concerned the island continent of Atlantis, the fabled empire located beyond the Pillars of Hercules (presumably the Rocks of Gibraltar in the western Mediterranean), as thoroughly detailed in Plato's TIMAEUS, that fell into the sea. Cayce’s readings described three separate disasters that befell Atlantis. The first catastrophe happened in 50,700 BC, caused by an explosion of gas pockets within the earth that triggered volcanoes and earthquakes, generated a magnet pole shift on the planet and produced a great Ice Age. The second catastrophe occurred in 28.000 BC, coinciding with the Biblical account of Noah and the Great Flood. After the deluge, the continent had been broken into three main islands: Aryaz in the east (present day Azores Island group), Poseidia in the north (West Indies area), and Og in the south (near South America). The final catastrophe took place in 10,600 BC. There were gigantic land upheavals upon the earth and the remaining land mass of Posedia and Aryaz (except for the mountain peaks) disappeared into the seas. The Cayce readings indicated the Atlanteans had been forced to relocate to various distant lands during the catastrophes, specifically to the Pyrenees Mountains (between Spain and France), Morocco (Atlas Mountains), Egypt (where they built the pyramids) and North America (where they formed the Iroquois nation). All Type X locations. In North America, the highest concentration of Type X lineage was found within the Iroquois nation (Ojibway, Oneota and Nuu-Chah-Nulth tribes). Cayce also reported some Atlanteans went on to the American Southwest and Midwest. The Navajo (Southwest) and mound builder region (Midwest) also contain some Type X subjects. The bottom line -- everywhere Edgar Cayce (psychic readings) claimed the Atlanteans settled after their land disappeared has a high unaccountable occurrence of a specific DNA type (type X) found nowhere else on this planet. This isn't exactly scientific proof of the prior existence of Atlantis, but we live in a very strange universe where everything is a sign that holds a mystery. Many of Cayce's readings are mysteries yet to be unraveled. Edgar Cayce claimed to have had the ability to link to the Universal Consciousness, which he referred to as the Akashic Records. Akasha is a Sanskrit word meaning "sky" -- a term used to describe mystical knowledge from another plane of existence. These records contain the entire history of human experience, and knowledge of the universe and beyond. "He who knows himself is enlightened... To the mind that is still the whole universe surrenders." Lao Tzu At the center of all humans is the source of all knowledge -- the first step to believe it, the second step is to seek it. ___________ Quote for the Day – “Man is a being in search of meaning." Plato ___________ Bret Burquest is the author of 12 books. He lives in the Ozark Mountains with a few dogs and often searches for meaning. ___________ - -

The Santa Dimension

When I was about five years old, I was excited to learn that Santa Claus was going to appear at my house early on Christmas Eve to personally hand Christmas gifts to my little brother and me. My parents explained that Santa was doing this as a special treat for us since we didn't have a chimney. Sure enough, Santa showed up. Although he was an hour late, according to my mother, I was thrilled to see him. I quickly rushed outside into the cold Wisconsin night but stopped several feet short. Something wasn't right. Santa was clearly wearing a mask on his face. I asked him why he was wearing a mask and he told me it was to keep warm. Later that holiday season, I overheard a conversation between my parents whereby I learned it was my grandfather pretending to be Santa and that my mother was very upset with him for showing up late and drunk. When my mother realized I had discovered the great Santa deception, she explained that Santa had so many houses to visit that evening that he didn't have time to make special stops and that my grandfather was just pretending to be Santa to make us happy. Once again, being a young innocent squirt, I bought the explanation. My grandfather was always a great guy, drunk or sober, and I appreciated him for stopping by on such a cold night just to please my brother and me. A few years later, in the second grade, I was hanging out with a couple of my buddies during recess. Usually we would shoot marbles behind a big oak tree so our teacher couldn't see us. Mrs. Henderson didn't like it when her boys would participate in games of chance, especially when marbles would change hands. Instead of playing marbles, we got into a discussion about Santa Claus. There had been some speculation that Santa Claus didn't really exist so the three of us tried to figure it out logically. Duncan Jones was the brains of the group, Vinny Gagliardi was ever so inquisitive, while I was more action oriented, preferring to play games of chance (marbles) rather than attempting to fathom the unfathomable. It all started when curious Vinny came up with a series of intriguing questions. • How does Santa visit so many houses on a single night? • How can he get all those presents in his sleigh? • How can reindeer fly? • How does a hefty guy like Santa manage to slip down a chimney and get back to the roof? • What does Santa do when there is no chimney? • How does Santa know whether you were naughty or nice? • And so on and so on. Duncan made some quick calculations. He figured if there were a billion houses and Santa took only a minute per house, or 60 houses per hour, it would take about 17 million hours, not counting flying time. Then there was the flying reindeer problem. Duncan and I were fairly certain reindeer couldn't actually fly, but Vinny wasn't so sure. He had seen an elephant fly in a Disney cartoon and it looked feasible to him. Soon a light bulb went off just above Duncan's head. Suppose there was a parallel universe. Santa could pop in and out of our reality almost instantaneously while doing most of his work in a parallel dimension. This would impose an anomaly in the continuum of time and space whereby a few seconds of our reality could be a year of Santa reality. This could also explain the reindeer problem. They don't actually fly -- there're merely transported to our reality directly onto the roof and disappear the same way. Santa makes his way into the house in the same manner. Apparently, according to Duncan, it's simply a matter of hyper-dimensional travel between simultaneous planes of existence. The bell rang and we had to go back inside where Mrs. Henderson made us print the alphabet all afternoon. She wanted to make sure we slanted our letters at the proper angle. Mrs. Henderson always emphasized penmanship and seating posture, but had a phobia about teaching math. Numbers greater than 20 made her nose bleed. It's strange how so many parents are unaware of parallel dimensions. They tell their kids the most ridiculous tales to make up for their lack of knowledge about the anomalies of the continuum of time and space. Merry Christmas y'all. ___________ Quote for the Day – "I stopped believing in Santa Claus when I was six. Mother took me to see him in a department store and he asked me for my autograph." Shirley Temple ___________ Bret Burquest is the author of 12 books. He lives in the Ozark Mountains with a couple of dogs and many fond memories of Christmas Past. ___________ - -

The Search for Adventure

There are two kinds of adventurers -- those who go hoping to find adventure and those who go secretly hoping they won’t On July 17, 1930, two high school buddies from Minneapolis, Eric Sevareid and Walter Port, boarded their canoe on the Mississippi River, near Minneapolis, and headed south. Soon, they turned right on the Minnesota River and traveled north-northwest, all the way to Big Stone Lake in South Dakota, the source of the river. They navigated onto Lake Traverse and followed the Red River north, eventually reaching Lake Winnipeg in Manitoba. Then they went northeast through uncharted territory of rivers, lakes and hostile (sparsely inhabited) terrain, and ended up on the shore of Hudson Bay. The entire journey took 14 weeks and covered 2,200 miles. The following year, Eric Sevareid enrolled at the University of Minnesota and received his B.A. degree in 1935. He wrote a book titled CANOEING WITH THE CREE, recounting the trip, and later became a TV broadcaster, alongside Walter Cronkite, on the CBS Evening News, where he earned two Emmy Awards. He died in 1992. Sevareid's account of the journey is filled with peril and misery, including constant rain, dangerous rapids and lengthy portages where they had to haul their canoe and provisions over soggy tundra to the next body of water. "Day and night, the drizzle did not cease for so much as an hour. The woods oozed with water, every leaf held a pond, every dead twig and log was rotten with wetness. We had paddled a canoe twenty-two hundred miles, had survived, and had proved nothing except we could paddle a canoe twenty-two hundred miles." Maybe they didn't prove anything to the rest of the world, but they probably proved something to themselves. In 1970, I was in graduate school at the University of Minnesota and had five weeks to kill between summer school and fall quarter. So a friend of mine, named Kent, and I decided to take a canoe trip in the Boundary Waters in northern Minnesota and Ontario, Canada. We were just a couple of restless pool hall fixtures in search of an adventure. I was bored and Kent’s train of thought was missing a caboose. I figured we’d make a good team. We started out on Gunflint Lake, on the border of Minnesota and Ontario. After two full days of paddling upstream on a river system connecting a string of small lakes, we made it to a tiny island in the middle of Big Saganaga Lake where we were stuck for three more days because of heavy winds and turbulent waters. When we finally got off the huge windy lake, we headed west along the Rainy River to Knife Lake where we made a wide loop up into Canada for nine days, then came back down across the U.S. border into a laborious grind from lake to lake and over difficult portages, some of which were several miles across rugged ground. During our entire trip, which started after Labor Day when summer vacationers were scarce, we only ran into another party of voyageurs on one occasion. We met them in the middle of a lake as they were traveling in the opposite direction. Basically, the two of us were alone in the wilderness, far from the troubles of the world. All in all, we covered a few hundred miles and it took 26 days to return to civilization. It was a grand experience, but not one Kent or I wanted to repeat soon. Besides the physical challenge of hauling a large, heavy canoe and well over two hundred pounds of provisions (tent, sleeping bags, spare clothes, food, etc.) over rough footing between lakes, there was also the challenge of getting along and pulling together. Sevareid reported that he and Port had gotten into a campfire wrestling tussle over their differences, no doubt prompted by the stress of the journey and the lack of a way out of the situation without completing the trip. Kent and I had plenty of disputes, but were too exhausted to get into a physical altercation. Instead, we alternated between teamwork and bickering. We were stuck with each other and needed to finish what we started before we ran out of food, so we kept plugging away across water and land until we eventually made it back to square one. In the end, we proved nothing, except we could paddle a canoe a few hundred miles. We also learned that mosquitoes never sleep, Kent couldn't read a map, and neither one of us was very easy to live with. A life without adventure is like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, without the peanut butter and jelly. If you’re not living on the edge, you’re taking up too much space. ___________ Quote for the Day -- “Tenacity is a pretty fair substitute for bravery.” Eric Sevareid ___________ Bret Burquest is author of 12 books. He lives in the Ozark Mountains with a dog named Donner and has many fond memories of adventure in his earlier years. ___________ - -

The White Buffalo

The Lakota Sioux are a nation of Native Americans who roamed the northern plains in and around the Black Hills of South Dakota. They have a prophecy known as the White Buffalo Calf Woman. According to the prophecy, two warriors were out hunting buffalo, approximately 2,000 years ago, when they spotted a white buffalo calf. As they approached the calf, it turned into a beautiful young Indian girl. One of the warriors had bad thoughts in his mind. The Indian girl told him to step forward whereupon a black cloud came over his body. When the black cloud disappeared, the warrior with bad thoughts had no more flesh or blood on his bones. The other warrior kneeled and prayed. The Indian girl told him to tell his people that she would bring them a sacred bundle in four days. So the warrior went back to his people and told the elders. Then all the Lakota people gathered in a circle and the warrior told them what the Indian girl had instructed him to say. On the fourth day, a cloud came down from the sky and off stepped a white buffalo calf. As it reached the earth, it stood up and became a beautiful young woman, carrying a sacred bundle. The woman spent four days among the Lakota people, teaching them the seven sacred ceremonies. 1) The purification ceremony of the sweat lodge 2) The child naming ceremony 3) The healing ceremony 4) The making of relatives or adoption ceremony 5) The marriage ceremony 6) The vision quest 7) The sun dance ceremony As long as the Lakota people performed these ceremonies, they would remain caretakers of the land. Then the beautiful woman left, the same way as she arrived, vowing to someday return for the sacred bundle. The sacred bundle, known as the White Buffalo Calf Pipe, has been passed down from generation to generation of Lakota and is kept in a sacred place on an Indian reservation in South Dakota. The White Buffalo Calf Woman also made several prophecies upon her departure. One of these prophecies was that the birth of a white buffalo would be a sign that it would be near the time of her return. And upon her return, she would purify the world, bringing harmony, balance and spirituality back to the earth, and all the races of man would live in peace. A white buffalo calf is projected to be a one in 10 million occurrence. These are about the same odds as finding the lost Ark of the Covenant in a Dumpster behind the convenience store in Toad Suck, Arkansas. In August of 1994, a white buffalo was born in Janesville, Wisconsin. Although this event excited many Native American at the time, this particular buffalo was actually born red and later turned white. On May 22, 2004, a white buffalo calf came into this world at the Spirit Mountain Ranch near Flagstaff, Arizona. This ranch has successfully bred three generations of white buffalo, As of the spring of 2008 their herd consists of 11 white buffalo. On May 31, 2008, a white buffalo calf was born in Jamestown, North Dakota. Plus, several other white buffalo have come into existence over the last decade. Peace on earth seems like a hard nut to crack these days. Too many people are determined to force their way of life on others, through coercion and violence. Ultimately, those who live by the sword, die by the sword. Unfortunately, it creates a bloody mess for the rest of us caught in the middle. You can’t change the world -- you can only change yourself. Peace on earth starts with patience and grace, and treating others the way you want to be treated. For the Lakota people, peace on earth starts with a white buffalo. Mi taku oyasin -- We are all related (Lakota proverb). ___________ Quote for the Day – “It is not necessary for eagles to be crows.” Sitting Bull ___________ Bret Burquest is the author of 12 books. He lives in the Ozark Mountains with a few dogs and an imaginary girlfriend named "Slowly but Shirley" ___________ - -

Secret Global Alliance

The most widely accepted theory of how the moon was formed is that a young planet collided with Earth more than four billion years ago, creating scattered debris that came together to form the moon. However, there are numerous extraordinary anomalies to indicate that the moon is actually hollow and possibly artificial. The moon is 2,160 miles in diameter, larger than the planet Pluto. It is 400 times smaller than the sun and 400 times closer to the Earth than the sun. Thus, during a solar eclipse as viewed from Earth, the moon appears to be the same size at the sun, as if perfectly positioned in place. If you divide the circumference of the sun by the circumference of the moon and multiply by 100, the result is the circumference of the Earth. If you divide the size of the sun by the size of the Earth and multiply by 100, you get the size of the moon. The outer surface of the moon is extremely hard. It has no magnetic field, yet moon rocks are magnetic. In November of 1969, the Apollo 12 mission to the moon, the crew landed on the moon in a rough manner onto the surface, some 40 miles away from their intended destination. Upon impact, the moon "reverberated" as if it was an artificial moonquake. NASA scientists declared that the moon "rang like a bell" for eight minutes, and continued to reverberate for more than an hour. In 1970, the Apollo 13 mission to the moon was aborted due to severe technical problems. The Saturn V launch vehicle (weighing 15 tons) was purposely crashed onto the surface of the moon, some 100 miles from where the Apollo 12 crew on the previous mission had set up the seismometers. The impact was the equivalent of 11 tons of TNT. NASA scientists said the moon "reacted like a gong" and continued to vibrate for three hours and twenty minutes, at a depth of 25 miles. A supervisor of the Data and Photo Control Department during the Apollo missions, Ken Johnson, claimed that that the entire moon "wobbled" in such a precise way that it was "almost as though it had gigantic hydraulic damper struts inside it." In 1972, the moon was struck by a meteor with the impact of 200 tons of TNT. This created enormous shockwaves deep into the interior of the moon, but none of the waves came back. The outer surface of the moon contains many minerals that are found in processed metals, which have never been discovered to occur naturally. • Uranium 236 (found in reprocessed uranium & spent nuclear fuel, as long-lived nuclear waste) • Neptunium 237 (byproduct of nuclear reactors & plutonium production, a radioactive metal) • Iron particles (which do not rust, not a natural phenomenon) Dr. Harold Urey, winner of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry, was perplexed by the moon rocks, calling them "mind-blowers." He said he was "terribly puzzled by the rocks from the moon and in particular their titanium content." Dr. S. Ross Taylor, the geochemist in charge of lunar chemical analysis, has postulated that the moon had to be covered with melted rock containing fluid titanium. However, the titanium could not have been distributed in this way, leading to speculation that a highly advance technology developed by unknown entities must have been responsible to this anomaly. According to Alexander Shcherbakov and Mikhail Vasin of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, the moon is likely to have been a very ancient spaceship, a planetoid that had been hollowed out by unknown beings with highly advanced technology. The two Russian scientists declared: "If a material had to be devised to protect a giant artificial satellite from the unfavorable effects of temperature, from cosmic radiation and meteorite bombardment, the experts would probably have hit upon precisely these metals... From the engineer's point of view, this spaceship of ages long past which we call the Moon is superbly constructed." Planet Earth is 4.53 billion years old. However, the material of the moon is 5.3 billion years old, while the surface dust on the moon is even older, at 6.3 billion years old. Therefore, the moon existed prior to the existence of Earth. Shcherbakov and Vasin continued: "Naturally the hull of such a spaceship must be super-tough in order to stand up to the blows of meteorites and sharp fluctuations between extreme heat and extreme cold. Probably the shell is a double-layered affair -- the basis a dark armoring of about 20 miles in thickness and outside it some kind of more-loosely-packed covering (a thinner layer -- averaging about 2.5 to 3 miles in depth). In certain areas, where the lunar 'seas' and 'craters' are, the upper layer is quite thin, in some cases non-existent." The thinner outer layers, averaging about 3 miles in depth would explain why moon craters are not as deep as they should be given the width of the impact zone. Theoretically, meteorites are unable to penetrate deeper into the surface when they collide with the dark armor layer of about 20 miles in thickness. The outer layer (3 miles in depth) acts as a buffer before the object encounters the 20-mile thick armor plating layer, which would only be slightly dented. Dr. K.L. Anderson, professor of geophysics and director of the seismological laboratory at California Institute of Technology, has declared "the moon is made from inside out." He believes the outer and inner compositions of metals and elements should be reversed. Thus, it's an artificial structure The density of Earth is 5.5 grams per cubic centimeter and the density of the moon is 3.34 grams per cubic centimeter. Based on astronomical data, NASA scientist, Dr. Gordon MacDonald, has declared that the interior of the moon must be hollow. The positioning of the moon dictates the angle at which the Earth rotates (22.5 degrees from vertical) and the speed of Earth's rotation. It also influences global tidal movements and since the human body is 70% water, it may also influence human physiology and/or behavior. The moon orbits Planet Earth in an almost perfect circular orbit and does not spin on its axis, like all the other moons in our solar system. The same side of the moon is always facing Earth, leading to the conclusion that the moon was placed in its current orbit and position by an intelligent entity. Thus, the obvious conundrum -- if the moon is hollow, created by a more advanced civilization, placed into its position and possibly occupied by advanced beings, what's up?? Could the moon be an observation satellite, occupied by advanced entities?? Do these advanced entities control or utilize human beings on Earth?? Do advanced entities use the moon as a staging area for ET visitation of Earth?? In 1959, Dr. Iosif Shklowvsky, a Russian astrophysicist, proclaimed that Phobos, a moon circling the planet Mars, may be hollow. He based this claim on calculations of the strange orbit and extremely low density of the satellite. Dr. S. Fred Singer, a former special advisor to President Eisenhower on space development, said that Phobos may be connected to extraterrestrials. In 1963, Raymond H. Wilson Jr., Chief of Applied Mathematics at NASA, declared that "Phobos might be a colossal base orbiting Mars." Once again, what's up?? It seems possible, worthy of examination and exploration. According to astrophysicist Hakeem Olusevi, "In our galaxy, we're talking about something like 400 billion stars, and we now think there are more Earth-like planets than there are stars. So we're talking about hundreds of billions of planets." And that's just within our own Milky Way Galaxy. Olusevi added, "There are hundreds of billions of galaxies in the observable universe alone, which we think is a tiny fraction of what the universe is." “Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.” Arthur C. Clark In 1960, NASA commissioned a report by the Brookings Institute on long-range studies. It included a section titled "The implications of a discovery of extraterrestrial life." The Brookings Report indicated that the disclosure of extraterrestrial life would have a disruptive effect on human society. This has led to the suppression of the discovery of and encounters with extraterrestrial life by government institutions involved in these matters. Perhaps the secret of the hollow moon is that we are faced with an enemy from beyond Earth and have been in a covert skirmish with this enemy for many decades. In the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan and Soviet Chairman Gorbachev both realized the existential threat of extraterrestrial threats and put aside the differences that had become known as the Cold War. The two super powers have secretly been allies in a joint effort to protect the planet from alien hostilities for many decades, while publically deceiving the world on the pretense of animosity between the two countries. When President Reagan initiated the Strategic Defense Initiative (dubbed Star Wars), it was not to combat incoming ICBMs from Russia, but to form a defense against extraterrestrial incursion upon Planet Earth. "We didn't have to shoot down thousands of Soviet incoming warheads, and the Soviets never really cared about the ABM Treaty in the first place because they knew they weren't going to launch a first strike and neither would we. We both knew who the real targets of the SDI were, and it wasn't a bunch of ICBM warheads. It was UFOs, alien spacecraft thinking themselves invulnerable and invisible as they soared around the edges of our atmosphere, swooping down at will to destroy our communications with EMP bursts, buzz our spacecraft, colonize the lunar surface, mutilate cattle in their own horrendous biological experiments, and even abduct human beings for their medical tests and hybridization of the species. And what was worse, we had to let them do it because we had no weapon to defend ourselves." Phillip J. Corso Philip J. Corso (1915 - 1998) had a distinguished career as a military Intelligence officer. He was the former head of the Foreign Technology Desk at the U.S. Army's research & Development department and a member of President Eisenhower's National Security Council. There is a covert oversight outfit that is responsible for protecting Planet Earth from alien interference. It is so top secret that most U.S. Presidents are out of the loop. It all started during the Truman administration in 1947, code-named "Shamrock" (a UFO working group), and has been operational ever since (under various deep-cover guises). "We can knock these guys down tomorrow with high-energy lasers and directed particle-beam weapons that come right out of a Star Wars movie. And these aren't fiction, they're fact." Phillip J. Corso United States and Russian military forces have been firing thousands of missiles in the Arctic regions, out of the earth's atmosphere, into the outer regions of our planet's atmosphere. These missiles are being launched from both land-based sites and aircraft. When this clandestine activity recently came to light, the U.S. and Russian governments claimed to be performing joint war games. These so-called "war games" were never announced in advance to the public. These bizarre events coincide with reports that the earth's atmosphere is being bombarded by unknown cosmic blasts. The BBC reported that "cosmic blasts (bursts of gamma rays) are the most powerful in the universe. Scientists think a 10-second blast near earth could deplete up to half of the planet's ozone layer." Something very strange and potentially dangerous may be taking place here. War games are not conducted in outer space unless an enemy threat approaches from outer space. During a speech to the United Nations in 1987, President Ronald Reagan announced, “Perhaps we need some outside universal threat to make us recognize this common bond. I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world.” Perhaps President Reagan was warning the world about potential extraterrestrial threats. Perhaps the USA and Russia are pretending to be "enemies" but are in fact secret allies in an effort to protect our planet from outside forces. Perhaps the USA and Russia are pretending to be "enemies" to keep their respective military budgets and black ops budgets high in order to fund their combined defense in their secret alliance against extraterrestrial threats. “Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.” Carl Sagan Do big deal -- life goes on. Do the aliens on the moon pull down their pants and "earth" their lunar friends? ___________ Quote for the Day – "The universe is a pretty big place." Carl Sagan ___________ Bret Burquest is the author of 12 books. He lives in the Ozark Mountains with a few dogs and where strangeness is a daily fact of life. ___________ - -