|
|
Click here to return to
|
|
|
LUNAR
EAVESDROPPING IN LOUISVILLE, KENTUCKY by C. Graney First created 8/29/09, last updated 9/2/11. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
In July of 1969 a Louisvillian by the
name of Larry Baysinger accomplished an amazing feat. He independently detected signals from the
Apollo 11 astronauts on the lunar surface.
Fortunately, his accomplishments were recorded and promptly published
in the Louisville Courier-Journal, by another
Louisvillian by the name of Glenn Rutherford, in an article entitled “Lunar
Eavesdropping: Louisvillians hear moon
walk talk on homemade equipment”. The
story appeared in the July 23, 1969 issue of the paper, on the front page of
section B. Scans of the article are provided
below.
Rutherford
was a 23-year-old reporter for the Courier-Journal. Baysinger was a technician for Louisville’s
WHAS 840 AM radio, and only a few
years older. The story garnered some
attention for Baysinger. He was
interviewed by the Collins Corporation who was very impressed that anyone could
detect the Apollo signals with home-built equipment.[i] However,
in time the story faded from view. I
learned just how much it faded by doing searches for information using keywords
such as “Baysinger” and “Apollo” in Google, as well as in EBSCO and JSTOR
databases. These searches yielded no
references to Baysinger’s work.
Searching “Lunar Eavesdropping” yielded no returns of any sort at all.[ii]
The
story came to light again thanks to a discussion between Rutherford and me
about some of the research Henry Sipes and I
had going on at Otter Creek-South Harrison observatory. Rutherford had written
about this research in July 2009.
Our discussion drifted into the issue of Kentuckians doing scientific
research and how people don’t tend to associate the words “Kentucky” and
“scientific research” very much (much less “Kentucky”, “community college”,
and “scientific research”, as the case may be with this observatory). And that reminded Rutherford of the story
of Baysinger’s work. Since
then I have had the pleasure of speaking to Baysinger directly. It is remarkable that these two gentlemen,
forty years later, should both still be here in Louisville, just a phone call
away! Baysinger
told me that the Apollo lunar eavesdropping project arose because in the late
1960’s he was an amateur radio astronomer with an interest in NASA, in
astronomy, in UFOs, and in other such things that were hot topics at a time
when America was on the verge of landing its first men on the moon. He experimented with satellite tracking and
capturing pictures of Earth transmitted from weather satellites. He had some success in these matters – for
example, he was able to print out crude images from weather satellites using
an impact printer that printed using carbon paper. These
interests and efforts led to the idea that he might independently verify the
information that NASA had been providing about the Apollo program. Could he get unedited, unfiltered
information about the Apollo 11 landing by eavesdropping on the radio signals
transmitted from the lunar surface?
And could he find out things that NASA did not want the public to know
about? Most
of all, successfully detecting a transmission from the lunar surface would be
a great technical accomplishment.
Various local experts said that it could not be done. On
the night of the Apollo 11 eavesdropping effort, Baysinger said he and
Rutherford had to essentially “bore-sight” the antenna on the moon – aim it
by getting behind it and sighting it like a gun. This was difficult since the weather was
cloudy and the moon not easily visible.
The antenna, which was originally built as a radio telescope to look
at naturally occurring radio sources in space, had a motorized steering
mechanism but it had to be manually guided.
Its “beam” or “field of view” was such that, once pointed at the moon,
it could be let go for a little while, but pretty soon it would have to be
re-aimed because the Earth’s rotation caused the moon to drift out of the
field and the signal to be lost. In
fact, this was one piece of evidence that, once the receiver started picking
up Apollo 11 signals, the signals were indeed from the moon – if the antenna
was not kept aimed at the moon, the signal disappeared.
Baysinger’s
wife and daughter watched the Apollo 11 landing on TV while Baysinger and
Rutherford listened via Baysinger’s equipment. The signal on the home-built equipment came
through approximately 5-10 seconds earlier than the signal on TV. Baysinger figures NASA or the TV network [I
assume it was probably CBS] put in a delay in case they needed to edit out
anything embarrassing. The
signal the lunar eavesdropping equipment picked up was noisy, but Baysinger
says you could hear what was going on.
Baysinger made tapes of the transmissions, which he still has. In September 2009 he transferred salvageable
sections of the tapes to MP3 format for this project. You can hear them for yourself via the
links below.
I
asked Baysinger whether he found anything that NASA edited out – comments
about things going wrong, the astronauts being loose with their language, or
exclamations about meeting aliens! He
said no – absolutely everything was transmitted to the public on TV. In fact he said, “that was kind of
disappointing”. Part of the idea of
this project was to hear the unedited “real story”, and it turned out there
was nothing edited out.[iv] Indeed, Rutherford’s story (click here for hi-resolution
version which you can read) makes no mention of hearing anything unusual. Baysinger
did not attempt to eavesdrop on any other Apollo missions. After Apollo 11 he moved on to other
projects. Various
Google/EBSCO/JSTOR searches have convinced me that there certainly were not a
lot of amateur radio astronomers eavesdropping on Apollo transmissions. An enquiry I made via the HASTRO-L history
of astronomy e-mail listserver did turn up the web page of
Sven Grahn. Grahn and Dick Flagg
apparently received some signals from Apollo 17 command module in orbit
around the moon, although the voice signals they received were limited to two
small sentence fragments and they were using a large dish to receive the
signals.[v] A German radio observatory also recorded
signals from the Moon, and their recording shares a number of things in
common with Baysinger’s (see audio files above). I made inquiries with a number of people in
the radio community, none of whom knew of anything comparable to Baysinger’s
work. These include Zack Lau, Senior
Lab Engineer for the ARRL (the national
association for amateur radio) and their QST magazine, who responded to an
e-mail I sent to QST to say that
they have no record of anyone picking up signals from Apollo 11; Rachel
Baughn, editor of Monitoring Times magazine, who
responded to an e-mail I sent to Monitoring
Times that had no information on this sort of thing; and Jim Sky of Radio-Sky
Journal who responded to an e-mail Henry Sipes sent to him – again, no
additional information. Phil Plait
featured Baysinger’s work on his Bad
Astronomy blog. His readers posted
many comments, but no definite information.
In general, people seem to be aware that amateur radio enthusiasts and
radio astronomers listened in on Apollo missions. But what was heard, whether the signals
were received from the Moon or just from the Apollo spacecraft when they were
in Earth orbit, and so forth is an open question. What truly makes Baysinger’s work unique is
that it was recorded in print at the time, and that he not only received but
recorded extensive audio, much of which has survived to this day. If someone else did succeed in
eavesdropping on NASA, but no record was ever made, and that someone is no
longer around, we will not know about it. Besides
the obvious “local interest” aspect to this story, there is a great
educational aspect as well. Most
people are aware that there is a significant (or significantly vocal) “Apollo
denier” movement that says that we never went to the moon. The Apollo deniers have received attention
through shows on Fox
and “Mythbusters”
that address the Apollo deniers’ arguments.
I have found that a noticeable minority of my students, or maybe more
than just a noticeable minority, are at least open to the idea that we never
went to the moon. In
a sense this is not surprising.
Today’s traditional-age college students were born decades after
Apollo 11. They have no memory of the
moon landings – Apollo is just something in a book. And, it is not obvious that we will be
returning to the moon any time soon; returning to the moon may be in NASA’s
plans in some way – but the fact is that with the end of the Shuttle program,
NASA actually has no manned space capability now. Thus the voyage to the moon probably seems
to today’s students like a mythical voyage such as might have been made by
Jason and the Argonauts, to a land which we visited once but to which we
cannot go now. And, since all the
evidence that we went to the moon comes from one source (NASA), it is
relatively easy for conspiracy theorists to make their claims. Had thousands of amateur astronomers been
able to see the men on the moon for themselves, there would be no Apollo
deniers. Baysinger’s
lunar eavesdropping is an independent verification that men were on the moon,
by a local person who is not part of the scientific establishment. Had there been more Larry Baysingers
eavesdropping on Apollo, or had there been more Glenn Rutherfords to record
the work of the Baysingers who did eavesdrop, there would be no Apollo
deniers. I just this semester (Fall
2009) presented a copy of Rutherford’s article to a student who doubted that
we went to the moon. Having the
evidence come from the Courier-Journal,
from Louisvillians, and not from NASA, was something new, and it obviously
had an impact. Of
course we can ask, did Baysinger really
pick up signals from the moon?[vi] Is it possible that he was merely detecting
spurious transmissions from a local radio or TV station that was broadcasting
the moon landing? Baysinger has asked
himself these same questions (click
here).[vii] However, several lines of evidence indicate
that these signals were not spurious: ·
The antenna had to be aimed at the moon in order to
receive the signals. ·
The audio could be heard through Baysinger's receiver
a few seconds before it was heard over TV.
·
The audio Baysinger recorded is different from the
audio provided by NASA in that Aldrin and Armstrong are can be heard, while
Collins, CAPCOM, and the PAO voice-over cannot. Were Baysinger picking up the local TV or
radio station, he should have recorded the same audio that everyone heard on
TV. A recording of Apollo 11 made from
a German radio observatory (click
here) is similar to Baysinger’s recording in this regard. For
so many reasons, this is a great story. Other
“Lunar Eavesdropping” items on the web: ·
“Eavesdropping on Apollo 11” – ARRL News
& Features 7/16/2010 (click here). ·
“Eavesdropping on the moon, circa 1969” –
Make Blog 11/3/2009 (click
here). ·
“Lunar Eavesdropping” – Discover Magazine Bad Astronomy Blog
9/28/2009 (click
here). |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
