On Wednesday’s episode of “The Michael Knowles Show,” Knowles speaks with Bill Whittle about the Apollo 11 moon landing on the eve of the 50th anniversary of the mission. Video and partial transcript below:
We’re joined by the host Bill Whittle from Esoteric Radio Theatre called “Apollo 11: What We Saw.” You’re a hit. This show goes up for five hours or something and it’s, and it goes straight to the top three on the all of the iTunes charts.
Bill Whitte: When I was 10 years old, I basically designed the moon landing and set up the Apollo program to be in place so that when I became 60 my podcast would reach stratospheric heights. Thank you for the kind words. I enjoyed writing it. The production work done here is out of the park, and, obviously, the reason people are so interested in this is because of the anniversary.
Michael Knowles: Because of the story. And you know you’re setting this up when you were five years old is only one of the conspiracies that I want to get to about the moon landing. But first, I actually just did a column on this yesterday. Because of your podcast, I had seen a few rumblings about this, and there is an episode from the moon landing that NASA basically blacked out. They didn’t want people to know about. They told Buzz Aldrin to shut up about it. You’ve got the Eagle lunar module that lands finally on the moon itself. And it’s not like they just hop out. It’s not like they park their Chevy and they’re going into the movie theater. They’re there for a number of hours in between the landing and when they go out and walk around the moon. What happens during those hours?
Whittle: Well, they were going to make the moonwalk about twelve hours after the landing. But for some reason landing on the moon and having all these failures and all this other stuff go down, having the entire planet looking at them and everybody’s entire attention focused on him, turns out the guys weren’t that sleepy, after all, you know. So, they moved it up six hours but during that six hours, once they had the LEM secure shutdown. By the way, when Armstrong got onto the surface of the moon, the first thing he did was pick up something called the contingency sample. He pulled out a scoop, picked up some stuff, put it in a patch just in case Buzz says, “We got to go. We got to go right now!” So, we would have something with us. But during that time there were still several hours before they start to get into their suits for the moonwalk, which was six hours after landing. And during that time Buzz Aldrin did something that he had asked permission to do.
And it’s not like NASA covered it up. It’s not like they denied any existence of it, but it was, needless to say, not publicized. Aldrin had got permission to take with him these two pouches. When he got to the moon, he removed this little silver flask. He opened one of the pouches and he poured a liquid into the flask and he said that in the one-sixth gravity it was amazing how graceful all the little bits of it curling around the thing were. And then he opened the other package and poured the contents of that into his other hand. He radioed mission control and he’s talking to the Mission Control, but this is not going out to the public, it’s just for basically for NASA. He said, “I think at this point I would like to ask everybody to take a moment to give thanks in whatever they find appropriate for this amazing achievement.” And then since he was an elder at the Presbyterian Church back in Houston, he took a consecrated wafer and he had a sip of wine from the chalice and he had communion on the moon. The first fluid ever poured on another planet was wine.
Knowles: This is an astounding moment. Especially when you look at it in the context of the Cold War in the space race. You have the first foods and liquids poured prepared on the moon are the consecrated body and blood of Christ. And I believe he read from the Gospel of John too: “I am divine.”
Whittle: I’m not sure what he read. I’m sure he read an appropriate short piece of scripture basically to himself. Armstrong didn’t participate. I don’t know if Armstrong was worried about the fallout or not, but it’s pretty clear that he wasn’t, that this was Buzz’s show. But Buzz, not just this one time risked your life, you’ve been risking the only life you’ve got for 10 or 15 years now and 40 years after the landing, so 10 years ago, when Buzz wrote his memoirs. you could tell that 40 years of political correctness was starting to work on him — look, you know, now maybe I regret it now but at the time I just felt like, you know, how else can you give thanks for this incredible thing that we’ve pulled off? This was my personal way.
Knowles: Of course. And you’ve got the God-fearing Americans, basically you’ve got this: What remains of Western Christendom versus godless atheists. You know we think of the Cold War in economic terms free markets versus collectivism, that was obviously a huge part of it. The other side of it was the atheism of communism. When Pope John Paul II went to Poland, had an open-air mass, the people chanted, “We want God.” This is so much an animating facet. And we beat the Soviets, we get on the moon first and Aldrin gives his broadcast. He says everyone give thanks in a private way and then deferring to NASA, deferring to political correctness, he turns off the radio, he reads the scripture to himself, and he takes the communion privately, which is an astounding historical moment.
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