Busting the myth: No Americans ever remained on the Moon for 50 years

The so-called "second golf ball" was found, which the commander of Apollo 14 took with him from Earth.

A shot from a video of Alan Shepard playing golf on the Moon.

A golf ball that was thought to have been lost on the moon 50 years ago was discovered thanks to the herculean efforts of Andy Saunders, a specialist in processing and restoring low-quality photographs. In one of these-restored-images taken at the landing site of Apollo 14, the ball "appeared".

Balls on the processed image from the surface of the Moon.

Here it is - the "second ball", about the location of which nothing was known for 50 years.

The Apollo 14 expedition was the third to land on the moon. On February 5, 1971, Alan Bartlett Shepard, the ship's commander, and Edgar Dean Mitchell, the lunar module pilot, arrived there.

On February 6, Shepard played golf on the moon. A television recording of the historical event, made by an automatic camera installed at a distance, has been preserved.

The first ball flew not far away, even by Earth standards-about 20 meters. The astronaut then defended himself, saying that space equipment – not the most convenient for swinging and hitting with a stick, which, by the way, was a team-turned into a shovel as necessary.

Shepard's footprints, imprinted at the moment of impact.

But Shepard was proud of the second punch. He claimed that he had flown the ball into the vast distances – for many, many kilometers. "Miles and miles and miles," in his own words.

The ball, as a result, "disappeared" – no one followed the impact. Which has supported the myth of Shepard's phenomenal achievement for half a century.

Lunar module and balls. Their location is marked on the image from orbit.

As Andy Sanders told the BBC, an ultra-long flight was theoretically possible. From the calculations that he made, starting to search for the "second ball", it followed that the multiple champion golfer Bryson DeChambeau, for example, playing on the Moon, where there is no air resistance, and the gravity is 6 times less than the earth, could send the ball more than 5 kilometers with one blow.

But the shepherd, as he is now Sanders and found nothing of the sort happened. In the pictures, which he added clarity, it became clear:" the second ball " all 50 children lay 36 meters from the place of impact – from the traces of Shepard, imprinted at the time of the swing.

An interesting coincidence: next to the "second ball" landed and "shell", which threw Mitchell. And the pilot of the lunar module threw, without looking, the shaft from the shovel-Javelin, as he called it, "throwing spear". The fate of the spear was also unknown for 50 years.

The" spear "mysteriously appeared next to the "second ball".

"Second ball" and "spear".

By the way, this is not the first time Sanders has turned to lunar images. In 2019-the 50th anniversary of the first American landing on the moon-he "restored" a photo that was taken by Neil Armstrong. He was filming Edwin Aldrin, who had flown in with him. But the only good thing was a figure in a spacesuit, and it was unclear who was inside. The face, hidden by the visor of the helmet, was barely visible in the blurred and shadowed image.

The face that appears in the picture (on the right) is definitely Aldrin's.

A clearer photo shows that Aldrin is definitely inside the suit. And a little earlier, the face of Neil Armstrong himself, standing on the surface of the Moon, was" made public". The collected photo-facts confirming that the Americans really were on the Moon, which a few skeptics still doubt, will be included in a book called "Apollo Remastered", which Sanders is currently working on.

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About author:

Serg Toporkov Ufologist, Ph.D., blogger, I go on my own expeditions for UFOs. I use scientific methods to investigate the UAP phenomenon. Write to me

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Apollo 14  Andy Saunders  Moon  assesment  debunked  Debunking  Myth  Americans