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LUNAR
EAVESDROPPING IN LOUISVILLE, KENTUCKY by C. Graney First created 8/29/09, last updated 4/4/17. |
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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, and the signal was lost when the moon set. ·
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: ·
“Space Ham” – BBC Radio 3 production
1/19/2013 (click here). Click here for
excerpt of the show featuring Baysinger and
Rutherford. The excerpt was provided
to Otter Creek – South Harrison Observatory by show producer Rose de
Larrabeiti, who learned about Baysinger and
Rutherford through this observatory’s work. ·
“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). |
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