A.D. After Disclosure

Dark Skies | Accept No Imitations

Friends and supporters have been contacting us, many with congratulations on how our “Dark Skies” has been made into a new film, starring Keri Russell, to be released by Dimension Films next February. While it sounds like a dream, we tell them, it’s actually a nightmare.

To set the record straight, we’re Bryce Zabel and Brent Friedman, the two writer/producers who created the NBC series called “Dark Skies.” It was produced by Columbia TV (now Sony) and aired in 1996 and 1997. We wrote the pilot, multiple episodes and produced all twenty hours that were aired in primetime on Saturday nights.

Our original “Dark Skies” introduced viewers to an alien invasion that featured a continuing focus on the mysterious and terrifying abduction phenomenon. So our well-intentioned friends can be forgiven if they hear about the Dimension Films version that focuses on an alien abduction and assume we had something to do with it. While that is decidedly not the case, our definitive version may have inspired it.

Our “Dark Skies” had been in the news even before Dimension decided to use our title for their film. Our series was given a world-wide release on DVD in 2011 from both Shout Factory (US) and Medium Rare Entertainment (UK). In dozens of reviews, the work received critical praise as a classic that has stood the test of time in the sci-fi and UFO media. It also spawned new interest in the reboot of our series, something that we were talking to Sony TV about when the news from Dimension Films broke.

Our "Dark Skies" has established itself in the minds of a significant number of science fiction fans as a gripping piece of conspiracy drama set in the world of UFOs and abductions. It anchored NBC's Saturday night "Thrillogy" concept in the 1996 season premiere and starred Eric Close ("Nashville") and the late film character actor J.T. Walsh (“Sling Blade”). Its main title design won the Emmy award and its pilot screenplay received a Writers Guild nomination. The Syfy Channel aired the entire series multiple times. Since 2010 there's been a Facebook page where thousands of fans from many different countries push Sony for a TV revival. 

And yet here we are. A film in the same genre as our work is being promoted right now using the same exact title as our work. Most Hollywood businesses legitimately consider creative and artistic interests and rights in these cases. This one seems to have slipped through the cracks of acceptability.

Supporters of the creative rights of writers should ask Dimension Films to let their film stand on its own merits and call it by a different title. "Dark Skies" is taken. 

Join the Dark Skies Resistance @ Facebook
https://www.facebook.com/darkskiesufo

See the Dark Skies Playlist @ YouTube
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL5A1058EDE798E4B1

Read more about Dark Skies @ AfterDisclosure.com
http://www.afterdisclosure.com/dark-skies/

Get the original, classic and definitive Dark Skies series @ Amazon.com
http://www.amazon.com/Dark-Skies-Declassified-Complete-Series/dp/B00465I156

WGA (Writers Guild of America) Credit, 1996
“Dark Skies” | Created by Bryce Zabel & Brent V. Friedman

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0115151/

The Non-Response Response from The White House

I would love to have been a fly on the wall when personnel of the Office of Science and Technology Policy of the Executive Office of the President at the New Executive Office Building in Washington , D.C., discussed how to respond to a petition about disclosing data on UFOs. I suspect that nobody brought up the enormous amount of information available indicating that not only are aliens visiting, but the US and other government have been withholding information for many decades. The response certainly indicates intentional lying and misrepresentation or total ignorance.

The petition, prepared and submitted by Steve Bassett’s Paradigm Research Group, went like this:

“We, the undersigned strongly urge the President of the United States to formally acknowledge an extraterrestrial presence engaging the human race and immediately release into the public domain all files from all agencies and military services relevant to this phenomenon."

I, for one, was not one of more than 5000 persons signing the petition. My reason was straight forward. Having worked under security for 14 years and having researched the flying saucer phenomenon (certainly most UFOs are NOT alien flying saucers) for 53 years , I believe there is a very strong national security side to the question. I cannot see releasing technical data that could be of use to other countries also researching the phenomena and wanting to duplicate the extraordinary flying capabilities of the flying saucers… for military purposes

The response was issued by research assistant Phil Larson. He stated “The US government has no evidence that:

• [1] any life exists outside our planet or
• [2] that an extraterrestrial presence has contacted or engaged any member of the human race. In addition
• [3] there is no credible information to suggest that any evidence is being hidden from the public’s eye.” No indication is provided as to just what sources, if any, were evaluated. Furthermore, a real red herring was provided “There are a number of projects working toward the goal of understanding if life can or does exist off Earth”.. He then discusses SETI, The Kepler Spacecraft, the Mars Science Laboratory, Curiosity, soon to be launched to Mars. None of these have anything to do with the extraterrestrial presence here, the petition’s topic!! Why mention them?

Larson generously concedes that "the odds are pretty high that somewhere among the trillions and trillions of stars in the universe there is a planet other than ours that is home to life”. Odds cannot be determined when there is no data. He also foolishly states that ”the odds of making contact with any of them.. especially any intelligent ones- are extremely small given the distances involved”. To which distances is he referring, billions of light years to very distant galaxies?? Or 39.3 light years to Zeta Reticuli? Where is any data to support these totally baseless claims? Does he have travel schedules for civilizations outside Earth? Surely the astronomical community knows nothing about interstellar travel. More about evidence below, but let us first look at [3].

False Assertions from The White House about ET

Sixty-four years after flying disks became a worldwide phenomenon, a formal position on this phenomenon has been issued in print by the executive branch of the United States government for the first time.   On Friday, November 4 the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) responded to two petitions submitted to the We the People section of the White House website.  One of these, the Disclosure Petition, was submitted by Paradigm Research Group.   The White House response gave the administration's assessment of the assertion by a growing number of researchers and activists that flying disks and other related phenomena confirm an extraterrestrial, non-human intelligence engaging the human race. 

See:  https://wwws.whitehouse.gov/petitions#!/response/searching-et-no-evidence-yet and www.disclosurepetition.info.

OSTP researcher Phil Larson wrote, "The fact is we have no credible evidence of extraterrestrial presence here on Earth."  Unfortunately for the OSTP and the Obama administration, that assertion is false.  Furthermore, given that approximately 50% of the American people are now convinced of an extraterrestrial presence and more than 80% believe the government is not telling the truth about the phenomenon, it is an embarrassment.

There are only four possible explanations for this statement from the OSTP:

Exopolitics: Report from Leeds 2011

Any naiveté, ignorance, or ambition in this article is entirely the fault and responsibility of the Cover-Up. The void that has been left by 60+ years of denial, ridicule, disinformation and containment, is being coloured in from the groundswell up, and I outright deny any and all culpability for the artistic licence I may take in my thought-processes.

‘Who appointed you God?’ asked John Loengard of the head of Majestic 12. ‘Ike. [Eisenhower]’ came the reply, in the Dark Skies pilot. All too likely. Perhaps. At least, it seems only too logical, despite no one telling Col. John B. Alexander about it.

Right now, the UFO community at large is having somewhat of a crisis of confidence, and at the Exopolitics Leeds Conference which I attended at the beginning of August, I think I bore witness to that. The organisers, including Anthony Beckett, received standing ovations at the end of the weekend for their efforts, and they well deserved them, certainly, three years into this convention, if but for nothing else than getting so many divergent authors and activists together under one roof. And this is where contention, division, and even outright hostility enters in. Fear and Loathing on the Disclosure campaign trail. Though don’t get me wrong, there was much that was good, but - to butcher Dante - I must also tell of the bad.

At Leeds this August, I was speaking to Natasha Acimovic, who along with David Griffin head up Exopolitics UK, and I would say are fairly close to the cutting edge of ufology. A sort of modern day Jim and Coral Lorenzen. We talked about how exopolitics gives the opportunity for diversity of opinion, of research, of figures on the scene, now and in the future. Cataloguing lights in the sky, while important, was the old days, now we are engaged across the spectrum, from the political to the personal. Certainly, the field of ufology has always been shifting. I mean, if WW2 veteran Donald Keyhoe, who founded NICAP were around today he’d probably slit his wrists or have a heart-attack. But we live in a very different world than the 1960’s. Wildly different, and getting more radical, more novel with every passing day.

Jack Witek, is a sometimes actor, full time dilettante in ufology, and generally reasonable chap. He Needs to Know, and feels you do to. He lives by the sea in Plymouth, England, with his insufferable alien-hybrid cat, Adramelech, or Adra for short. You can catch him in one of the city’s many fine drinking establishments sipping German beer with his head buried in the latest UFO book, trying to look inconspicuous yet mysterious. 

The ancient Chinese, in their wisdom, cursed us in triplicate

1. May you live in interesting times. 
2. May you come to the attention of those in authority (sometimes rendered May the government be aware of you).
3. May you find what you are looking for.

Exopolitcs is logical result on the first, which leads inexorably to the second, which brings with it the danger of the third. Despite the media (in deference to Nick Pope, yes, that is a generalisation) brushing it aside, putting it down, hushing it up, hurrying it along and laughing it into the Middle Ages and its parade of bumpkin superstitions and prejudices, there is a core of sightings, of encounters, of government projects, of a 60 year paper trail, leading us ever further to the startling conclusion that we are not at the top of the food chain.

As for the second, I think Richard Dolan, and others, have amply demonstrated, this lead to a select few at the top the human pyramid to take it upon themselves to be custodians of this reality. This has led to a collective blind spot that cannot engage with this paradigm, and so here we are trying to rehabilitate the situation. God help us.

Now, thirdly. While I understand it isn’t necessarily sexy and might not make you friends to agree with Mr Pope on certain issues, I think he makes a very valid point, as he did to Sun newspaper reporters covering the conference this year, about marrying ourselves to certain political causes, like 9/11, however worthy those causes may or not be. We have to pick our battles, and we run the risk of over-reach, and of the hubris of thinking we have the answers to this mystery when in fact we do not. Not to a satisfactory degree, anyway. We have leads, we have data, we have models, we have evidence. We can prove - not as much as some of us would like.

However, on a side note, after reading Witness to Roswell by Schmitt and Carey, the former of which Bryce Zabel is writing a film script about called Majic Men, well, if the evidence and witnesses amassed in that volume were to be presented in a fair court of law, I think they’d have a hard time denying that something very important happened that night in 1947.

But that was the past! This is the present! Focus on the real life and death issues today! Ok, I’ll do my best. To reference Sherlock Holmes, nonetheless, there is the Scarlet Thread that runs through all of this, the reality of the UAPs/UFOs in and of themselves, and the behind-closed-doors reality of political and military interest, conspiracy or not.

Breaking News From Roswell? Or Journalistic Malpractice?

The long rumored crash of a craft of unknown origin outside of Roswell, New Mexico in July of 1947 has just been solved. The US government was wrong. The US Army Air Corps was wrong. The US Air Force was wrong. And more amazing, over 500 witnesses directly or indirectly involved were wrong! The latest "theory of the month" has been proposed by author, Annie Jacobsen in her just released book about Area 51 and a single addendum about Roswell which for some reason is getting all forms of media attention. I will limit my response to address strictly the Roswell Incident of 1947.

Simply put, this represents another classic example of lazy journalism at its worst and investigative malpractice at its finest. I recall when the Air Force was planning on the Pentagon release of their "fifth" official explanation for the Roswell case. It was reported to us that the new "theory" was what actually crashed was a Russian flying wing with a... get this... crew of monkeys in silver jump suits. The story would continue that the fiery crash would burn off all their hair and leave all the witnesses bewildered as to what they truly were. We immediately sent off a FAX to Washington just asking one question: "Which monkey was flying?" End of story. And the same applies here.

The mere suggestion that the Soviets captured a Horton Brothers "flying wing" at the fall of Berlin in 1945 (mind you, none were operational at that time and they were mainly constructed of wood), manned it with 13 year-old mutants created by German scientist Joseph Mengele as to appear "alien", flew all the way from Russia, intended to crash in New Mexico, the heart of the most militarily sensitive territory in the world, to "scare us." To say totally absurd would be an under statement.

Donald Schmitt is the co-author of the best-selling book,Witness to Roswell, and is the leading specialist who continues to investigate the Roswell Incident. He is the former co-director of the J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies, where he served as Director of Special Investigations for ten years. Prior to that, he was a special investigator for the late Dr. J. Allen Hynek. The Showtime movie Roswell was based on first book, UFO Crash at Roswell. His latest book and life rights have been optioned, along with those of Stanton Friedman, as the basis for the feature film project, Majic Men.

The German brothers, Walter and Reimar Horton experimented with flying wings in much the same way that Jack Northrop did in California during the 1930s. Historically, all of the NAZI prototypes were destroyed by American forces at the fall of Berlin - so they would not fall into the hands of the Soviets. The only Horton H.IX to survive is now kept at the Smithsonian in Washington.

Writer Jacobsen claims that the Soviets created mutants to resemble the Martians described by H.G. Welles in War of the Worlds. Jacobsen should know that Welles modeled them from earthly octopus. That, and the fact that the Russians never did capture Mengele paints an illustration of pure fiction.

It never seems to matter what the new alternative explanation is. These theorists never address the unusual, exotic characteristics of the wreckage. The weightless, nearly indestructible material. The material that possessed perfect memory. The fiber optics. Except for the later, no one on earth has such material even today. And there must have been divine intervention to save us if either the Germans or Russians had it back in the forties.

The author states that Area 51 was named due to her one lone anonymous source's claim that the crashed craft and children were moved there from Wright Patterson in 1951. In reality, Nevada is divided into sections and the facility just happens to be in Section 51.

We have presented and named in our bestselling book Witness to Roswell, and previous books since 1991, hundreds of eyewitnesses who were actually there. Witnesses who right up to their deathbeds swore that what had crashed, what they held in their hands, and the bodies they loaded into ambulance trucks, were not from this world. These are all ignored by the US national media because it can't be therefore it isn't. Anything but UFOs is alright with these so-called guardians and keepers of the truth. Except, when it applies to Roswell -- the truth be damned no matter how ridiculous the alternative "theory." We chose to present the facts as presented to us by the truth bearers - the participants.

In recent weeks, we have all heard dozens of versions of what took place during the raid which killed Osama bin Laden. Have any of us noticed that none of these accounts come from the actual participants? For the same reason over the past twenty years, we have focused on the people who were there... not the so-called "truth" that some journalist or government official wants us to believe. Eyewitnesses send people to prison and serve as the staple for our judicial system for a reason. I can solve every crime ever committed by just siting at my computer and throwing out "theories." It's up to us as objective, free thinking, rational individuals to examine the evidence and decide which carries the greatest weight. Over 500 witnesses can't all be wrong and would certainly win hands-down in any courtroom throughout America.

And so I have just one question for Ms. Jacobsen regarding her new "magic bullet" solution to Roswell. After we obviously have wasted all of our time and effort all these years:  Which of the 13 year-olds was flying?

I just thought I would ask.

Disclosure: It's All About the Threat Level

For those of you familiar with the UFO issue and the people involved in it, the name Doctor Carol Rosin is well known as the lady that worked with Werner Von Braun at Fairchild Industries from 1974 to 1977.

In his final days, she says he told her the reasons we would use to continue to develop missile defense systems and to put them into space. In the 70s, of course, we were using the Cold War -- the fear of a nuclear attack by the Russians -- to build all kinds of missiles. He told her that when the Russians were no longer a valid threat, they would use the terrorist threat and the threat of rogue third world nations such as North Korea. The last card he said they would use would be the threat of alien invasion.

We have seen the Russian threat pass and the terrorist threat is probably now in some degree of retreat. The people are much more aware of what is going on around them now than they were twenty years ago. The internet has had a big part in this awareness. The problem now is how to distingush the truth from all the lies.  There is much distrust in our government now. Conspiracy theory is everywhere. 

Bill May is a retired auto mechanic, motorcycle enthusiast and musician who has been interested in UFOs since childhood. After a stint in the Navy, he moved to Nevada and has consistently run into people who are knowledgeable about Area 51 and government cover-up issues. These days he lives in Oklahoma where he continues to ponder how all the pieces fit together.

With the recent death of Osama Bin Ladin, President Obama is looking much better to many people. His ratings are starting to improve and the GM bailout has turned out to have been a good move with GM now showing record profits. President Obama has been briefed on all this by the work of Dr. Stephen Greer and the lobbying efforts of Steve Bassett. He has not yet responded to that information but he would have to be living under a rock not to have knowledge of their work. When you have an astronaut such as Dr. Edgar Mitchell going on CNN and saying that ET's are real and we have made contact, I am sure any president would start asking questions.

Letter from England: Synchronicity 2011

Call me a crank, but for many years now, I have been a watcher of sunsets and sunrises, a sky gazer in general, on this “pale blue dot” we call Earth, a “mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam," as Carl Sagan so beautifully and humbly immortalized our predicament. I was recently talking to a landscape photographer, and we both agreed it had to do with perspective, whether photographing or just gazing, of catching a moment, a zenith, the cusp before it turns. A kind of boundless immanence where nature, where life does not stop to catch its breath and goes on forever, into the inky phosphorus dark of imperial night, or the unconditional mystery and open promise of a new day.

These are the kinds of things I think about but the last six months have given me a new way to ponder because of two projects that seem to have "right place, right time" written all over them.

A.D. After Disclosure: The People’s Guide to Life After Contact

Richard Dolan and Bryce Zabel have some much more radical ideas on the question of UFOs, and the far ranging implications thereof for us on terra firma. Published in 2010, the book is a collaboration between an Oxford trained academic turned UFO researcher and historian, and a producer and writer who created the cult classic show Dark Skies, and former chair of the US Academy of Television Arts & Sciences. Dolan has spent the last decade writing and publishing volumes of his UFOs and the National Security State, which meticulously chronicle a history of UFOs and their cover-up that is still being written, in the real world and on the page. A modern archeology of declassified documents and witness testimony, of lives and careers that were made, and even buried because of the UFO, the conceptual rosetta stone to understanding this subterranean world being the historical formation and ascendant hegemony of the National Security State. ‘Like the “missing mass” astronomers are trying to locate in the far reaches of our universe, the UFO phenomena rests on an ocean of dark matter, deep secrets, and forgotton wars fought only in shadows,' writes Jacques Vallee in the foreword to Vol.1 of Richard’s history.

Dark Skies: History is a Lie

Mid-January 2011 saw, for the first time on DVD, the release of Dark Skies. Watching it, the first thing that struck me about it is just how good it really is. It was ahead of its time, and tragically cancelled just as it was beginning so promisingly. No wonder that some people speculated it was cancelled for political, i.e., conspiratorial reasons, owing to its themes, which cover crop circles, cattle mutilation, alien abduction, ancient astronauts, secret space programs, and many historical personalities woven into the script including the Kennedys, with every episode reminding that History Is a Lie, following John Loengard and partner Kimberly Sayers as they go on the run across America from Majestic 12 and the alien threat. Certainly, it is criminal, the treatment the series was handed, given how much work and clearly love was put into it. The show captures some of the optimism, idealism, wonder and terror of the 60’s. The beautiful, glowing cinematography brings to life the ambiance of the times, without gimmick but with plenty of novelty and dark humour, each episode flies by and each year rolls on, passing through the decade, through the heights and the depths, bittersweet and retrospective, archive footage blending seamlessly and kinetically with the story, the sci-fi with the historical.

The need you buried deep,
The secrets that you keep are at the ready,
Are you ready?

Foo Fighters, The Pretender  

In the Beginning...

One of my favorite scenes is from the pilot, where Captain Bach of Majestic 12 and his suit-and-tie adorned team of need-to-knows investigating a classic-style crop circle make a fly-over in a military helicopter of the field. It’s just charming. It captures such a quality of the mystery and wonder and even naivety that must have accompanied any such incidents, where now the phenomena proliferates multidimensionally on dorm posters and fridge magnets, but back then was a very new world to be discovered, studied and conquered. You can easily imagine it would have been just like this, back then, to those in the know.

Hollywood and the Discourse on Disclosure

Many a UFO skeptic will tell you that UFOlogy (and, nowadays, exopolitics) feeds on and thrives largely as a result of images projected by the American entertainment industry: it is Hollywood, they’ll insist, that fuels the UFO mythos.

The art historian, John Moffitt, for example, views UFOs and extraterrestrials purely as “hyperreal” constructs – which is to say that they are “real” in a cultural sense, but have no grounding in our lived historical reality. Moffitt suggests that, as far as UFOs are concerned, there never was a “real” to begin with – the UFO phenomenon is entirely psychosocial, a complex simulacrum sustained in large part by mass-media images and audience culture. Moffitt notes that “American films and television have now become the major vehicles for propagating in a postmodernist, transglobal “visual culture” the popular imagery of lurking ETs and their high-tech UFO vehicles.”[i] In Moffitt’s view, “the extraterrestrials only persist as recognisable visual phenomena due to zealous attention paid to them by their audience culture. No audience culture: no attention.”[ii]

The suggestion inherent in this “audience culture” theory is that Hollywood “creatives” simply bring forth from their fertile imaginations entirely original UFOlogical ideas and design concepts which are then projected to and absorbed by an (assumed) passive audience, provoking continual reports of UFOs and aliens, certain details from which, in turn, feed back into the entertainment industry to fuel the endless hyperreal cycle that is the modern UFO phenomenon. The psychologist Susan Blackmore, propounding this same idea within the framework of memetics, suggests that UFOs and aliens are “a memeplex consisting of the idea of four-foot high, skinny, large-headed creatures with big black eyes, an image of the ships they come in... and all the other details we are fed through the media.”[iii] 

Tales from the Vault: A Second Look at Special Agent Guy Hottel

Larry Lowe is a veteran UFO investigator, respected journalist, TV host and radio guest who is dedicated to truthful UFO disclosure. His work is featured at Examiner.com and is re-printed here with permission.

A 60 year old routine FBI memo that has been available to the public for over three decades -- which some say is at the end of a chain of custody of the truth that began with a lecture by a con-man who would later be convicted of fraud -- is suddenly the latest news in UFO "disclosure."

A week after the FBI website released a revamped document access system a wave of Facebook postings has propogated an inaccurate concept:  That the FBI has released proof of an alien spacecraft crash near Roswell, New Mexico in 1947 -- and that this constitutes disclosure of UFO reality.

On April 1, 2011, the Federal Bureau of Investigation released a news story at the www.fbi.gov website announcing "a revamping of our electronic reading room—renamed 'The Vault' — which contains more than two thousand documents that have been scanned from paper into digital copies so you can read them in the comfort of your own home or office."

The Vault, hosted at vault.fbi.com, included a category for 'unexplained phenomenon' a single page with a handful of entries, one of which has triggered in the last two days a tsunami of misinformation and excitement among UFO reality advocates who don't have a firm grasp of UFO event history.  

Whether or not the initial story release and the December 6, 2010 planting of the Guy Hottel memo was a subtle form of April Fool's joke on the part of the IT department at the FBI, the result was textbook example of why good information is so hard to come by in the field of UFO studies--it is too easy for bad information to circulate uncontrolled.

The menu for the Unexplained Phenomenon (oddly presented in the singular) page reads as follows:

Actually, You Can Get Here from There

"You can't get here from there."

That simple expression sums up the most common objection to the notion that some UFOs represent intelligently controlled extraterrestrial vehicles. The saddest part is that it's just plain wrong.

Usually few details are given by people who make this statement, but the objections tend to be that it would take too much energy, take too long, and the laws of physics, especially relating to Einstein’s Theory of Relativity prevent it.

Very few such comments, even though from well educated professionals, are based on serious attempts to really determine feasibility. It as if the details don’t matter. It is impossible. As noted in the chapters on aviation and space travel in “Science Was Wrong” (Ref.1), it is clear that the devil is in the details. Aerospace engineers have long since performed the “impossible” such as flying faster than the speed of sound, flying non-stop around the Earth, etc.

Stanton Friedman is a nuclear physicist who started writing about UFOs in the 1960s and has stubbornly refused to quit, making him the veteran researcher actively working in the field of Unidentified Flying Objects today. Inducted into the Roswell Hall of Fame in 2010, Stan is the original civilian investigator of the Roswell incident. His dogged investigation has, for many, legitimized a collection of Top Secret documents that had been leaked about the shadowy Majestic-12 group formed by Harry Truman. He has written five books in the ufology topic.

A good scenario is available to determine how easy it is for smart people to go far astray. Astronomer Dr. John Campbell published a paper (2) in 1941 attempting to determine the required initial launch weight of a rocket able to send a man on a round trip to the moon. He had pages of equations and concluded that the initial launch weight would have to be a million million tons. In 1969 NASA sent three men to the moon with a Saturn 5 multistage chemical rocket whose initial launch weight was only 3000 tons. He was wrong by an incredible factor of 300 million! He understandably assumed chemical rocket propulsion systems. Unfortunately, he had not studied the considerable engineering literature that had been published by such very competent engineers as Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, Hermann Oberth, Robert Goddard and many others.  But his assumptions clearly indicated he knew nothing about the practical side of space flight to the moon.