Moving the Moon into Place

On November 20, 1969, the crew of Apollo 12 dropped their empty lunar module onto the Moon, and the seismometer they had left on the surface shook for about fifty-five minutes. Wernher von Braun wrote a few months later that the Moon had rung like a bell for nearly an hour. Five months after that, a spent rocket stage hit harder, and the shaking went on for about four hours.Scientists have offered several answers over the years to the question of where the Moon came from. A smaller group of people, spread across twenty-five centuries, gave a different kind of answer. They said the Moon was not born here. It was brought.They are not one crowd. Greek and Roman writers called the people of Arcadia older than the Moon, and one ancient commentator dated its appearance to just before Herakles fought the Giants. A tradition from the hills above Bogota, written down in 1688, named the woman who flooded the valley and was driven into the sky to become the Moon. In July 1970 two Soviet writers announced in a Moscow magazine that the Moon was a hollowed planetoid steered into orbit by an unknown intelligence. In the decades since, a contactee said the Orions carried it here from Ursa Minor in the tail of an asteroid, a channeler said it was an Orion battle station placed in its present orbit 25,000 years ago, a pilot said an electromagnetic vehicle grabbed it at Mare Orientale and towed it in, and a self-described insider said it arrived carrying refugees from a destroyed planet in the asteroid belt half a million years back.Moving the Moon into Place gathers every one of those accounts, names who said it, dates when they said it, and sets them side by side. The scientists’ remarks that the theorists quote are traced to the magazine, the journal, or the book where they first appeared, and the places where a paraphrase hardened into a quotation are marked. Nothing is argued down. The claims themselves are the subject.Inside:The Arcadians who lived before the Moon, from a fifth-century BCE historian through Ovid, Plutarch, and Lucian, and the one Roman writer who said the name meant something elseThe Sputnik article of July 1970, the two names on it, and the pen name behind one of themDon Wilson’s twenty miles of space armor, George Leonard’s anonymous engineer, and Zecharia Sitchin’s KinguWhat Harold Urey, Gordon MacDonald, Sean Solomon, and Isaac Asimov actually said, and where their words were sharpened laterMaldek, from a 1953 contactee book through the Ra Material, Moongate, Alex Collier, Sheldan Nidle, and Corey GoodeEvery arrival date on offer, from 11,213 years ago in the month of March to half a million years, set against each otherThe closing chapter states the book’s position in one plain sentence: the Moon was brought here and put into place.About the AuthorChuck Miller is an Eagle Scout, an independent creator, and a media professional in Houston, Texas, with thirty-seven years across broadcasting, entrepreneurship, and creative work, including production credits at ABC, CBS, NBC, and FOX affiliates and five Telly Awards as a commercial producer. He has written more than ninety books on artificial intelligence, public investigations, and the unexplained, each one built on named sources and plain language for the person at the kitchen table.