APOLLO 19 AND 20: NEW CLUES AND REVELATIONS ON THE CASE

“RETIREFADB”, ARE YOU AN IMPOSTOR? HERE HIS ANSWER 

by Luca Scantamburlo

CLUES ON THE WILLIAM RUTLEDGE’S IDENTITY

Could “retiredafb” – YouTube user who claims to be William Rutledge, now 77 years old- have been a former civilian test pilot on various aircrafts? He told us this and other things: that he was born in Belgium in 1930 (in Grembergen, he specified in his user-card on-line on YouTube) and that he was employed in the last century with Avro, Chance Vought and the USAF, before taking part in Apollo 20, a classified mission to the Moon alleged by him to have taken place in August 1976 from Vandenberg AFB aboard a Saturn V moon rocket. 

  It is entireley possible that Apollo 20 could have been a secret joint US and Soviet space mission that occured one year after the famous Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, which launched in July 1975.

  According to his testimony granted to me in an interview, Rutledge’s last job before retiring was working on the KH-11 project (USAF). He explained me also that the ASTP (Apollo-Soyuz Test Project) was the preparatory mission to Apollo 19; and later Apollo 20, after the presumed failure of Apollo 19 and the loss of its crew. He told me that the ASTP was, for the Americans, the Apollo 18. Is it possible and correct under the historical point of view? Let us begin by examining the historical record. 


  APOLLO 18? YES, IT DID EXIST AND IT DID TAKE PLACE

  As the matter of fact, an official NASA Web page with an indication that ASTP was a mission involving Soyuz 19 and Apollo 18 capsules, can be found at the following link: http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/apollo/welcome.html 

 The caption “Apollo 18” identifies who the United States crew members of the ASTP were: Thomas P. Stafford, Vance D. Brand, Donald K. “Deke” Slayton. Although we have no evidence in the historical record that Apollo 18 was followed by Apollo 19 (due to Apollo 19 being most a secret USAF mission), William Rutledge gave a precise definition for the ASTP. It was correct, in spite of the fact this information is not well-known by the general public.

THE KH-10 AND KH-11 PROJECTS

  According to William Rutledge, his last job before retiring was working on the KH-11 project (see my interview to him, answer n. 7). Moreover, he told us that he was a volunteer for the MOL-Gemini program (see his answer n.4 – and Fig.1 of this article), but he told me in a private YouTube communication he was not chosen. 
  From the historical record, MOL means “Manned Orbiting Laboratory”, and was a program created by the USAF (not NASA) to put Air Force pilots in Space for periods up to 40 days. Canceled in 1969,  the MOL program was replaced by the KH-11 program. Due to the need to surveil the entire surface of Earth, MOL-Gemini was designed so it could be launched from Vandenberg AFB (for insertion into polar orbit). I have found that MOL was also known as KH-10 (code name: “Dorian”). This is what surprised me because Rutledge did not mention MOL-Gemini as KH-10, but he mentioned KH-11. Thus, we can conclude that what William Rutledge’s account of his involvement as potential pilot for the MOL-Gemini (KH-10) and his participation to KH-11 program as an employee before retiring, comports with the historical record.

  The KH-11 (code name: “Crystal”) is a series of military satellites launched from Vandenberg AFB from December 1976 until the end of the ’80s, and were used as reconnaissance satellites placed in polar orbit for global surveillance purposes. 
   If you are interested in obtaining more information on the issue, visit the F.A.S. website (fas.org). Formed in 1945 by some atomic scientists and engineers from the Manhattan Project, F.A.S. is an acronym for Federation of American Scientists and was created by them because they knew just how important it is to provide information to the public to help encourage and facilitate discussion on critical national decisions.

HIS BIRTHPLACE: GREMBERGEN, BELGIUM

  What can be said about his presumed birthplace in Belgium? William Rutledgte updated his YouTube card at the beginning of June 2007- if I remember well – when he added as his birthplace the name “Grembergen”, but between brackets. I have checked on some encyclopaedias and on the Web: Grembergen is a small Belgian town close to Dendermonde, in Oost-Vlaanderen region. They speak French and Flemish languages, the two official Belgian languages. Oost-Vlaanderen is the Eastern Flanders, where Grembergen is located. 

  About the retiredafb’s presumed surname (Rutledge), I received some help from South America: an engineer (G.C. – he asked me not to mention him, with exceptions oh his initials) wrote me an e-mail about it. He recommended that I search for the surname, “Rutledge”, at familienaam.be, a website where you can find a geographical diffusion of a Belgian family name. So I have found two zones in which the family name “Rutledge” is present, or perhaps native. In one of them there is Antwerp city (in Italian we say “Anversa”). But Antwerp is a city near Grembergen: only 27.3 km by air and 33.6 km by road. You can check the distances using, for example, Microsoft AutoRoute.  

  This is an interesting clue. If “retiredafb” is a faker and an impostor, he has chosen very well his presumed surname and place of birth, coherent with the geographical diffusion of the family name, “Rutledge”. Otherwise, I guess we have a piece of evidence which indicates he indeed does exist and that he is most likely a Belgian man by the name of William Rutledge, who became later an American citizen.  

  The main question is: was William Rutledge really a civilian former test pilot and astronaut who worked as contractor for USAF in the ’70s? (today, for istance, the Blackwater security firm and its activities for the DoD are well-known, as Kevin Smith pointed out during his radio talk show with me as guest, at the beginning of October 2007).

ABOUT THE APOLLO 19 AND THE LUMINARY PROGRAM: DETAILED KNOWLEDGE OF THE APOLLO PROGRAM 

  In recollecting the dramatic loss of the Apollo 19 spacecraft and its crew, it was amazing thing to me how William Rutledge was more precise about it before what he told me in the interview (see answer nr.13); on May 23 he told me in our contacts (see Fig.3) that:

  <<Apollo 19 had a loss of telemetry wheile being at the end of the TLI, it was not clearly explained at this time, but it is beleived, it was a natural phenomemon, a collision of the aircraft and one of Cruithne brother, who was not identified in 1976. >>
May 23, 2007, 06:12 PM, from my YouTube Account

  I did not know what TLI meant, and I have found later that it is the acronym used to indicate the propulsion maneuver which sets a spacecraft on a trajectory which will intersect the Moon. TLI stands for “Trans Lunar Injection”.

  <<[…] In 2 hours and 38 minutes, the J-2 engine on the aft end of the S-IVB stage is due to be restarted in a maneuver that will send Frank Borman, Bill Anders and Jim Lovell further away from the Earth than any human has ever ventured. This is the TLI or Translunar Injection maneuver.>>

http://history.nasa.gov/ap08fj/02earth_orbit_tli.htm. 

  Another thing that surprised me is what I have found about the data Rutledge gave us in the interview (see answer nr. 10). Here you have his original words I received on May 25, 2007, again without any correction:

  <<[…] CSM is command module service, DSKY was the computer “display keyboard”, we used many acronyms .AGC is apollo guidance computer, same that dsky, but located in the apollo spacecraft and coupled with a telecope (aot on the lm).In some videos, the first image you see is the dsky pannel with lines prog indicates the program running verb and noun verb indicates what the dsky has to do and show. Before filming i had to enter verb 15 (display MET, mission elapsed time, or hours minutes seconds since liftoff, then noun 65 for displaying on therre rows, hours on the first line minutes ont the second, and seconds/tens of seconds on the third line). Then i had to film the creen to date the tape. >>

May 25, 2007, 07:06 PM, from retiredafb’s message to my YouTube Account.

  So I checked on the Apollo 15 Delco LM Manual – LM DSKY, that you can consult on-line because there is the PDF version of the full Delco LM Manual (181 Mb) created by Frank O’Brien. Moreover, there are some pages which were extracted from the PDF version 
http://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/a15/a15LMDSKY.html   
  It is enough to choose the right files (verbs and nouns) 

  In this case I downloaded the A15DelcoLM-11 and the A15DelcoLM-06 JPEG images. Yes, Rutledge said something right. Verb 15, in the list of verbs used in Program Luminary, means “Monitor Octal Components 1, 2, 3, in R1, R2, R3”, while the noun 65 means “Sampled LGC time (fetched in interreput)

00XXX. h

000XX. min

0XX.XX sec

  Again, it seems William Rutledge knew something consistent with space filight concepts and particularly with Program Luminary (see also the interview to him, answer nr. 13). 

ABOUT ROSWELL, REVERSE ENGINEERING AND TRIANGLE SPACECRAFTS ON THE MOON

  I want to point out that the presumed former test pilot (William Rutledge), before he granted me the interview,  in our private contacts told me something I did not made public yet. You can imagine how I felt months ago, and why I did not reveal the information. I was a little skeptical and shocked at the same time. As journalist I am aware that I must protect my source of information, but also spreading information and evidence which can help the public to understand how much truth there is in the case. So, I will not spread any information which can compromise his life or causing troubles to someone else.

  It does not matter if he is really a former test pilot or just an impostor. Ours was a private communication, with some portions of it for sure destined to the public. Though I have the feeling he told me many things because he wanted to make them public, and I know that it is in the public interest collecting evidence and details for our understanding, I have to be very careful in spreading his information.

  What did William Rutledge tell me?

  Rutledge told me something about the UFO cover up, about J.F. Kennedy’s assassination (he put a wrong date on his message: 1961 instead of 1963, but if W.Rutledge is not an impostor, it could be just a so-called lapsus calami committed by an old man, a common mistake that everybody does at least once in the life) and about reverse engineering carried out in USA, after retrievals of 6 alien spacecrafts crashed between Alamogordo and Roswell, in 1947. Moreover he also mentioned Corso to me, and something about the propulsion system of the alien spacecrafts.

  This occured on May 23, 2007, before the interview. Here you are some of his original words, without corrections:

  <<[…]  six craft fel on earth between alamogordo and roswell, 5 in alamogordo>>

  I am going to spread these information (true or false I do not know yet) to the public in the future, but before that, I want to write an affidavit for SpaceHeroes.org, in which almost every our communication taken place on YouTube will be a single exhibit.

  About triangles spacecrafts on the far side of the Moon, and about the reasons for he decided to speak out, Rutledge said to me (see Fig.8):

  <<[…] about the spacecraft, one triangle was accessible) in a triangle craft, we found two bodies, one in bad condition, a meteor cut the body at the neck level, we tok the littl skull on board.  The other body was strange, NDNA, not dead not alive, but crusted with impacts, stalagmites of blood coming out of hemmoragias zones. One body was on apollo 20, fixed on a hammock, and we passed hours watching the hands, the strange hair, not the kind you see a scifi movie. The hair was in good condition, we can say alive, alexei tested it.The ship was not explored on the 4 kilometers, but no place detected for weapons.>>

  May 23, 2007, 07:42 AM, from retiredafb’s message to my YouTube Account.


  <<[…] -no military craft, exploring one, Crew of 300, two female pilot on trangles. […] I choosed to to it know because all apollo program had to be definitely locked with th outgoing of ‘the marvel of it all’ presented april 20, presenting the 12 astronauts alive who stayed on the moon. 
  I t was a trahison for me , for alexei, and for the 3 dead astronauts of amollo 19. My girlfriend Stephanie ELlis, first american woman in sace, fisrt afro maerican woman was killed during this mission, i have no place to pray for her, her remains are still in orbit around earth.>>

  May 23, 2007, 07:48 AM, from retiredafb’s message to my YouTube account



NEW CONSIDERATIONS ON THE DIMENSIONS OF THE CIGAR-SHAPED OBJECT ON THE FAR SIDE OF THE MOON

  As dr. Carl Sagan used to say (see his television program “Cosmos”), science is a self-correcting process. Of course journalism is not science, but I guess the principles are valid and apply the same way. Let us begin from a mistake I made while I was discussing on the controversial Apollo 19/20 case.
  At the end of October 2007 I was spokesman at a conference organized in Lucca, a city close to Florence (Italy). The evening topic was the dark side of the Moon and the presumed Apollo 20 mission, officially never occured. Another spokesman of that evening was completely not in agreement with me. In spite of the deep throat by the name of William Rutledge (“retiredafb” on YouTube) has pointed out a huge cigar-shaped object on the far side of the Moon, he declared the Apollo 20 mission completely a fake. According to him, even that object is a result of a natural phenomenon that took place on the lunar surface in the distant past.

  The strange thing is that he made some calculations to estimate the object dimensions, and he obtained some results which indicate the object is longer than what we thought (see the Salvatore Valentin Carta’s assessment: lenght of 3.370 km and width of 0.510 km). Because the Italian spokesman referenced Izsak crater as the crater immediately close to the cigar-shaped object, using it as ruler, I believed his result was wrong. As the matter of fact that crater is not the Izsak crater; it is what W. 
  Rutledge has indicated as “Izsak D” – it looks like a double impact crater, whic appears as a figure eight-shaped crater. But as a coincidence its dimensions are almost like Izsak crater dimensions, which are known by the scientific community. So that evening in Lucca city I was correct about the Izsak crater position, but I was incorrect about the lenght of the so-called “spaceship” resting on the backside of the Moon.  

  Whatever that strange object is (a strange natural formation or an alien spacecraft), its lenght is more than 4 km. We can safely say between 3 and 5 km. William Rutledge told us that is approximately 4 km long.  
  I can say this because after that conference in Lucca, I worked on the pictures by myself to measure the pixels of the objects. First of all, I downloaded a free software: ZoomMagic(Copyright PeakStars). With ZoomMagic you can measure objects dimensions in pixels and in centimeters.  
  We know that the Izsak crater is in the South-East lunar quadrant, on the backside of the Moon. 
  Of course, for this reason, is not observable from the Earth. Its dimension are: 30x30Km / 18x18Mi; you can check on the Virtual Moon Atlas, a free software under the GNU General Public License (database © Ch. Legrand) very well done and useful. Otherwise, you can check by the astrogeology.usgs.gov database.  
  So we can use Izsak as ruler. I have chosen a JPEG image listed as AS15-M-1720, from the Apollo Image Atlas (LPI). it is a Hi Resolution Image (2.9 MB): (Width) 2400 x (Height)  2397 pixels.

  We can think of the longitudinal axis of the cigar-shaped object as the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle. I have measured the two catheti: 16 pixels and 67 pixels. To find the hypotenuse we can use the well-known Pythagoras theorem: I have got the value of 68.88 px. With a simple ratio we can calculate the dimension in km of the huge object of the far side of the Moon:
  
  430 (px): 30 (km) = 68.88 (px): X (km)

  What I got is: x= 4.80 km. X in this case would be the object lenght, considering the approximation that the cigar-shaped object is parallel to the lunar soil, and that there is no perspective effect in the picture.  So we have a lenght of almost 5 km. 
  My feeling is that huge object is not a natural formation and if there is the tiny possibility it is artificial, it was and it is mandatory for mankind to investigate that lunar anomaly with a robotic or a manned mission on the far side of the Moon.

© L. Scantamburlo
November 8, 2007

Reproduction is allowed on the Web if accompanied by the statement
©  L. Scantamburlo – www.angelismarriti.it 
Reproduced by permission.

– Fig.1 –

The MOL (Manned Orbiting Laboratory), known also as KH-10:

– US Air Force illustration –
.

– Fig.2 –
Detail from the retiredafb’s public account on YouTube; image taken from a YouTube Web page 

(C) YouTube

– Fig.3 – 
(updated On Nov 2007)
   Since the beginning of my communication with him by YouTube (even before the interview), “retireafb” showed me detailed knowledge of space flight terminology: see the “TLI” acronym.  
from my YouTube Account /General Messages 
(May 23, 2007) – L. Scantamburlo

– Fig.4 –
In this snapshot you can see the first message with the answers for the interview. 
from my YouTube Account /General Messages – L. Scantamburlo

– Figg. 5/6 –
The retired’s messages sent to me 
on May 28, 2007 
from my YouTube Account /General Messages – L. Scantamburlo

– Fig.7 –
In this snapshot of my desktop, you can see some of the original retiredafb’s anwers to me; here he talks about the DSKY and the AGC 
from my YouTube Account /General Messages – 
L. Scantamburlo (May 25, 2007)

– Fig. 8  –
In this snapshot  of my desktop, there is the Rutledge’s message where he tells about the presumed triangle spacecraft on the far side of the Moon, in which they would have found two bodies
from my YouTube Account/General Messages – L. Scantamburlo (May 23, 2007)

NASA illustration for TLI 
(Trans Lunar Injection)

– Courtesy NASA –

List of verbs used in Program Luminary – from the  
Apollo 15 Delco LM Manual 

– LM DSKY – Courtesy NASA

List of nouns used in Program Luminary – From the Apollo 15 Delco LM Manual

– LM DSKY – 
– Courtesy NASA –

The AS15-M-1720 NASA picture: you can see the Fermi walled plane, the Izsak crater on the left and the “Izsak D” crater on the upper right of the picture 

– Courtesy NASA/LPI

The detail of the NASA picture listed as AS15-M-1720, but rotated of 90°  

– Courtesy NASA/LPI –

The Izsak crater

Diameter 30 KM  
it is a detail of the image AS15-M-1720 taken from an altitude of 114 km (Apollo 15 mission); Camera Tilt: VERT; Revolution: 44;
Sun Elevation: 20°; 
Lens Focal Length: 3 inch  

-Image and data courtesy NASA/LPI