Miss Emily suggested I do some research concerning Neal Armstrong’s landing on the moon, mainly determining whether he actually did it and more importantly, whether or not anybody believes he did.

Well, I’m a sucker for anything controversial, so I bit.

After all an old antique like myself can remember the event (or scam, depending on what camp you were in.) and most of the events surrounding the occasion. I can remember various occasional comments from both camps.

For instance my father, who had considerable experience dodging V-2 rockets in WWII, was in the “Hell-yea,- they-done-it” camp, while my grandma Bailey was among the skeptics. After all, she’d had about 80 years of country farm-life experiences and had considerable moon watching time accumulated and didn’t see anything to convince her that anything had changed and laid it all down as being another batch of lies cooked up by the government or the media or the Democrats. (Grandpa Bailey wisely didn’t make any statements one way or another)

Mr. Gordon Hopper, who was a cropduster and who had engaged three Japanese zeroes and one “Betty” bomber at Leyte Gulf and lived to tell the tale (more than once) was not among the skeptics. He’d had a glimpse of the advances being made in modern technology.

But he said, “The government if it says anything at all, or nothing, is always lying to one degree or another. It’s the nature of the beast.” And there were some who believed the Russians had put a manned and monkeyed spacecraft aloft but were hesitant to believe we “shot the moon” and thought it to be a hoax cranked out to make it look like we had caught up. Face it, children, it did all look kinda phony and made up.

“One step for man” etc. was too Hollywood to be spontaneous and smells of overkill in the drama department. One of the other points brought up by Uncle Frank, who served during the war was a “spook” with the Office of Special Services, said that since Col. Armstrong had a highly classified job he might have been brainwashed into believing that he was there whether he was or not, thus bolstering yet another ‘60’s era conspiracy theory.

That thought carried more weight than it merited because government scandals and LSD were gaining more prominence in the Washington news as well as in old Volkswagen buses with flowers painted on them.

Col. Armstrong has stood by his version and personally, I’ll go with it. He claims that he left a camera behind and if anybody ever gets around to “back tracking” him it would be conclusive proof. On the other hand, maybe not.

I personally know people who would tamper with the evidence in either direction just to win a two-dollar bet if they could get close enough to the moon to do it, and apparently it gets closer every day. This froo-fraw about whether or not it happened as portrayed doesn’t aggravate me as much as the admitted statement by the good Colonel himself that he littered on the moon with a discarded junky old camera.

He could be fined for doing that in Crenshaw and probably in Batesville as well. He better be glad he did it on the moon instead of Crenshaw because Mayor Barlow would make him go back and pick it up at his own expense and haul it back to Martin Brothers scrap yard and use the proceeds to pay off the fine and at the very least reimburse the city and that ain’t half of what the city of Batesville would do.

They could have confiscated the spacecraft and impounded if and charged $50 per day per pound until the debt was satisfied and published the crime in a newspaper so as to add embarrassment  to insult and injury.

Col. Armstrong, you are a lucky man to have been out of Panola’s jurisdiction, we’re glad you made it back in one piece but you really shouldn’t have left all that scrap iron in the virgin wilderness of the moon, it sets a bad example and reflects poorly on the nation. Otherwise it was a good job.

Stargazing,
Ricky Harpole
(Contact Harpole at www.facebook.com/harpolive or www.colespointrecords.com)