Ken's Moon!

The story of Ken Johnston’s archive of historic NASA photos and his decision to go public with evidence of the manipulation of those images from the Apollo moon missions is the stuff of legend in the alternative history community. The basic story is that Ken discovered a disturbing situation in the secret halls of our hallowed space agency. At the Lunar Receiving Laboratory, Ken was the Director of the Data and Photo Control Department, responsible for all the photographs and data generated by the contributing scientists from around the world. He also produced and edited the NASA Lunar Sample Information Catalog for each of the Lunar landing missions. One day, Ken enters the room where he sees strange activity. Given that he feels a sense of responsibility for the integrity of the NASA collection, he inquires as to what is going on. He spoke with several people who called themselves “strippers” because they were stripping out details in lunar images that might be hard to explain. That day, they were at the task of painting out the stars in particular lunar images. The unusually lame excuse given was that the stars in the lunar sky would “confuse people.” This was alarming for Ken to discover. He found out also that “smudging out” anomalies on images was commonplace. Ken’s story could be counted as a minority report in NASA’s branded panorama of American heroics. The US Government and the American people had allocated significant financial and other resources toward the goal of reaching the moon at the behest of our young President Kennedy. The idea was to see what was there, to share that information to the world, and elevate the knowledge of mankind. To discover that the artifacts of that effort might have been manipulated was highly disappointing. It is this scenario being asserted by Ken Johnston, the very human being, who at one time, had watch over the chain of evidence.