Ancient Aliens on the Moon (2 page)

The Earth-Moon system, as seen by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

The Moon also has an exceedingly uneven or “lumpy” gravitational field. While it is generally true that lunar gravity is about ⅙
^th
that of Earth due to its much lower mass, there are also areas mostly on the Earth-facing side where the gravitational field is much stronger. These areas generally match up with the darker Maria, or seas, and are called “mascons” (for Mass Concentrations) because the gravity of the Moon is so much stronger there. Why the Mascons exist is something of a mystery. According to established theory, a topographic valley, or depression—which the maria generally are—should have what scientists call a “negative gravitational anomaly,” meaning that the gravitational field of the Moon is at least slightly weaker there. Instead, the gravitational field is much stronger, and as of the moment there is no really good explanation for this. Oh they’ve tried, blaming the mascons on the supposedly denser “basaltic lavas” the mare are supposedly made up of. But the vast mare sea Oceanus Procellarum is the biggest mare area on the Moon, and it has no mascon anomaly to speak of. All we can say for certain about the mascon basins is that there is something very dense beneath them, or something very powerful creating the gravitational anomalies.

Lunar mascon map showing mascons in the five of the largest “seas” on the Moon; Mare Imbrium, Mare Serenitatus, Mare Crisium, Mare Humorum and Mare Nectaris.

Over the centuries, the Moon has been known by many names. While we call it simply “the Moon” (taken from the old English “mone” or “mona”), ancient Germanic tribes called it “maenōn.”
²
To the Greeks, it was known as “Selene” and to the Romans of course, “Luna,” as in the previously mentioned lunatic. In ancient Persia, the moon was known as Metra, the world mother, and to the Aztec tribes it was Mictecacuiatl, a fearsome beast which traveled the heavens looking for victims to consume.

Contrary to popular belief, there is no “dark side” of the Moon. Because of its constant motion in orbit around the Earth and its own constant 27 day synchronized spin, at some point in the month the entire lunar surface is exposed to the light. We’ve also discovered in fairly recent times that the maria, or dark stuff, seems to reside pretty much only on the side that constantly faces Earth. The backside, or dark side, if you must, has almost no maria-type seas. This is an enduring mystery, at least to the mainstream scientists, that this book may yet shed some light on.

The Moon is about ¼ the Earth’s diameter and about 1/81 its mass. The Moon is also the 5
^th
largest satellite in the solar system, and the largest relative to its parent planet. There is no comparable arrangement of two such bodies anywhere in the observed universe. In fact, the Earth-Moon system is so unusual that science fiction author Isaac Asimov once referred to the arrangement as a “double planet.” The Moon is also the only major satellite in the solar system that the Sun actually has a stronger hold on than the parent planet. Using something Asimov called the “Tug of War” value, he found that the Earth’s gravitational pull on the Moon was less than half that of much farther away Sun:

We might look upon the Moon, then, as neither a true satellite of the Earth nor a captured one, but as a planet in its own right, moving about the Sun in careful step with the Earth. To be sure, from within the Earth-Moon system, the simplest way of picturing the situation is to have the Moon revolve about the Earth; but if you were to draw a picture of the orbits of the Earth and Moon about the Sun exactly to scale, you would see that the Moon’s orbit is everywhere concave toward the Sun. It is always “falling toward” the Sun. All the other satellites, without exception, “fall away” from the Sun through part of their orbits, caught as they are by the superior pull of their primary planets – but not the Moon.

— Isaac Asimov
^3
,
4

Exactly why this would be the case is unknown, but we can use it simply to reassure ourselves that the Moon – and its arrangement with the Earth, is very, very strange.

While the differences between the Earth and Moon are significant, there are also some unaccountable similarities that give rise to the question of just where the Moon came from in the first place. There are at least four competing mainstream theories for how the Moon ended up in orbit around our planet. Those theories are not only somewhat contradictory, there is at least
some
evidence to support each of them.

Back in the day, before we actually went to the Moon, the popular idea was something called the “Lunar Fission Theory.” First advanced in 1878 by George Howard Darwin, son of Charles Darwin, the Lunar Fission Theory argued that at some point in the past, the Earth had got to spinning so fast that it broke off or ejected a huge chunk of itself, which spiraled away and formed the companion body we see comfortably orbiting us today. The theory was that this chunk of the Earth’s mantle (the thick rocky layer just below the Earth’s crust, about 20-30 miles down) was somehow broken away in a violent episode, possibly caused by the Sun’s gravitational pull. In other words, sometime after the Earth cooled and assumed a solid form, a chunk of the Earth’s solid mass was somehow weakened, and then the sun pulled it off into a stable orbit about 240,000 miles out. The most popular location for all this material to have come from was the Pacific basin, a huge depression in the planet that at some places is as much as 35,000 feet deep and is wide enough to easily contain the entire continent of Africa. Since the Moon is about ¼
^th
the size of the Earth, the Pacific basin could easily be the source of the rocky material necessary to create the Moon itself.

The Lunar Fission Theory would also neatly explain some of the enduring mysteries of the Moon. While the Moon is ¼
^th
the size of the Earth, its gravity is, as I mentioned, only ⅙
^th
that of Earth. The discrepancy is accounted for by the fact that Moon has a much lower overall density and less mass. Being made up mostly of lighter materials normally found in the Earth’s crust or mantle (the layer right beneath the crust) the Moon also has a relatively tiny core. Only about 3 percent of the Moon is thought to be made up of a heavier nickel-iron core, whereas the Earth’s nickel-iron core makes up about 30 percent of its much greater mass.

If in fact the Moon was somehow spun off from the Earth itself, all of this would make sense. If the material required to make the Moon came from the lighter upper mantle of the Earth, then the Moon would obviously lack the heavier core elements that the Earth possesses. As the material that broke away collapsed and compressed, these heavier elements would sink to the middle and form the core. In fact, such an exotic composition is exactly what we would expect if the Lunar Fission Theory were substantially correct. However, there are three mechanical objections to the Lunar Fission Theory that would seem, on the surface anyway, to discredit it, at least to some degree.

General comparison chart of the Earth-Moon system.

The first objection to the fission theory is that the Earth-Moon system simply lacks the required
angular momentum
, or spin energy, for it to work. In order for a solid chunk of the Earth to break away in the equatorial region and spin off into space, the Earth-Moon system would have to have about twice as much of the spin energy it currently possesses. In order for the Earth to become unstable (and the resonant vibrations necessary to achieve fission to occur), a single day would have to have been about 3 hours long, rather than the current 24. Since angular momentum is assumed to be a constant, where did all this “missing” spin energy go?

The second objection is that such an eruption would most likely be from the equatorial region of the Earth. If this were the case, then logically the Moon would orbit around the Earth’s equatorial plane, much like the planets orbit around the Sun’s plane of the ecliptic. Instead, we see that Moon’s orbital plane is tilted 28.5 degrees to the Earth’s equator.

The third objection was that the newly broken away Moon would have had devastating tidal effects on the Earth, and possibly been broken apart as it passed the Earth’s destructive “Roche limit.” It is argued that no evidence of such tremendous tidal disruptions exists in the geologic record today.

Despite all this, the Lunar Fission Theory remained popular well into the twentieth century. One fanciful account from a 1936 U.S. Office of Education script for a children’s radio program told the story this way:

“FRIENDLY GUIDE: Have you heard that the moon once occupied the space now filled by the Pacific Ocean? Once upon a time—a billion or so years ago—when the Earth was still young—a remarkable romance developed between the Earth and the sun—according to some of our ablest scientists … In those days the Earth was a spirited maiden who danced about the princely sun—was charmed by him—yielded to his attraction, and became his bride … The sun’s attraction raised great tides upon the Earth’s surface … the huge crest of a bulge broke away with such momentum that it could not return to the body of mother Earth. And this is the way the moon was born!

GIRL: How exciting!”
⁴

However exciting, the Lunar Fission Theory began to get some competition by the early 20
^th
century. In 1909, an astronomer by the name of Thomas Jefferson Jackson See proposed a new idea; that the Moon had just been wandering by and was somehow “captured” by the Earth’s gravitational pull and settled into a stable orbit. This scenario, while possible, is highly improbable for a number of reasons. First, celestial objects tend to move through the vacuum of space pretty quickly. The Earth, for instance, travels at about 67,108 mph through space, which generates quite a bit of inertia, or momentum. How the Earth’s relatively weak gravitational field could capture another object moving past and pull it into a stable orbit is a problematic question with no easy answer. In an attempt to resolve it, the capture theory was modified so that the Earth in the distant past had a much denser atmosphere that was also much greater in volume. If this had been the case, the dense atmosphere could have helped slow down the wandering Moon, but so far no evidence supporting this proposal has ever emerged.

And there were other problems. Even without the highly expanded atmosphere idea, the intricate celestial dance required to make the capture theory work would be incredibly complex and almost unimaginably coincidental. Since nothing like it has ever been observed anywhere in the universe, it remained a very unlikely possibility even before the astronauts landed on the Moon and brought back rock samples. It was really then that the capture theory completely fell apart.

Logically, if the Moon was just wandering by and somehow magically captured by the Earth’s gravitational field – which remember is weaker than the Sun’s hold on it—then a couple of assumptions therefore follow. The first is that since the Moon by definition would have formed somewhere else, it should not be made up of materials similar to Earth or of the same relative age. That’s where the moon rocks came in. What they showed is that not only is the Moon made up of the same “stuff” as the Earth, it was, like the Earth, formed some 4.5 billion years ago. So all things considered, the capture theory didn’t ever really get off the ground. But it did give rise to another idea, which became all the rage for a period of time in the late 1970’s. This was the “co-accretion theory.”

The co-accretion theory arose from the accretion theory of planetary formation (which I thoroughly dismantled in my last book,
The Choice).
This idea, initially advocated by the French astronomer Edouard Roche, argues that planets are formed by simply coalescing from the leftover dust and debris of exploded stars. These debris clouds are called “nebula” by the astronomical community, and the idea is that clumps of material begin to form in these primordial nebula, run into each other, magically glue themselves together, and eventually become planets. Roche simply expanded the notion so that the Earth and Moon formed literally side by side, just as we see them today. However, the co-accretion theory cannot account for why the Moon is so much less dense than the Earth, or why it has such a small core and virtually no heavy elements. Logically, if they formed together in the same region of the primordial soup, they should have similar compositions and densities. Not only that, but the CO–accretion theory could not account for the high amount of angular momentum (spin energy) in the Earth-Moon system.