Just a short time ago I blogged about Russia's Moon plans, and as a follow-up, Mr. N.P. and Mr. B (and a few others), noticed this curious story: It seems that Mr. Dmitry Rogozin, head of Russia's Roscosmos, joked to reporters about Russia's plans to verify if the USA actually went to the Moon during the Apollo program, or not. Here's two versions of the story:

Russia's top space official says their mission to the moon will help verify conspiracy theory

Russia will check if Americans really went to the Moon – Roscosmos chief

And here's the Business Insider's (the first link above) version:

The head of Russia's Roscosmos space agency has said that a proposed Russian mission to the moon will be tasked with verifying that the American moon landings were real. "We have set this objective to fly and verify whether they've been there or not," said Dmitry Rogozin in a video posted Saturday on Twitter. Rogozin was responding to a question about whether or not NASA actually landed on the moon nearly 50 years ago. He appeared to be joking, as he smirked and shrugged while answering. But conspiracies surrounding NASA's moon missions are common in Russia. The Soviet Union abandoned its lunar program in the mid-1970s after four experimental moon rockets exploded. In 2015, a former spokesman for the Russian Investigative Committee called for an investigation into NASA moon landings. (Emphasis added)

And here's RT's version (the second link above):

Have the Americans been on the Moon or it’s just a hoax as conspiracy theorists claim? All questions will be answered when the Russian cosmonauts visit the Earth’s satellite, Russia’s space boss, promised. “We’ve set such a task – to go there and check if they were there or not,” Dmitry Rogozin joked in response to the popular question about the moon exploration. “The Americans say – they’ve been there. We’ll verify that.” Switching to a more serious tone, he said that no country is currently capable of fulfilling a successful lunar program on its own. Russia (is) expecting to cooperate with the US in exploring the Earth’s satellite, Rogozin said as he visited a Russian spacecraft engine manufacturer in Moscow. (Boldface emphasis added)

Now, if you're like me, you like to read between the lines a bit, especially when it's coming from Russia, and especially when it's coming from the head of its space program, and especially if the head of said Russian space program appears to be joking. Uh huh.... nod nod, wink wink, elbow jab. Now, just for the record, I'm not an Apollo hoaxer, i.e., I'm not one of those who believe we didn't go at all, and that the whole thing was hoaxed on a movie set, in some versions, courtesy of Stanley Kubrick. But on the other hand, I'm not one of those entirely dismissive of the "problems" that the hoaxers have spotted, some of which to my mind are not real problems, and others which honestly are. So I'm one of those who questions certain details in the overall narrative. One of my chiefest problems with the "complete hoax" scenario has always been why the Soviet Union didn't blow the lid off of it right away, which they could easily have done. Why remain silent about it? After all, the Cold War was in full swing, Richard Nixon was in the White House, Leonid Brezhnev was in the Kremlin. The upshot of it is, when the head of Russia's space program gets asked a question about the Apollo missions, and jokes about Russia finding out for certain whether or not it actually did happen (or, for those of you who are in my position that it happened, but not like we've been told it happened), then I sit up and pay attention, because of course it gets my high octane speculation juices flowing. In this case, I have a few crock pots of various suspicion casseroles simmering as well. Suspicion One: Rogozin is sending messages, mainly to NASA, but also to "other interested parties." The other interested parties are, of course, all those other nations that have sent probes to, or around, the Moon: China, Japan, India, Europe (aka Germany-France). The problem here is: what's the message? If you know, keep quiet about it, let us be the point men? But as far as NASA goes, Rogozin has already indicated that the Russian mission will be heavily reliant upon robots to do the initial scouting, and preparations, for a human lunar base. Certainly those robots could be landed close to the Apollo sites, and meander on over for a closer look at... what? Nothing? or at some sort of technology that changes the whole narrative (including the possibility of technology that the USA did not bring there, but found there)? Suspicion Two: After Rogozin had his little "joke," he then goes on, according to the RT article, to state that no one country is now capable of "fulfilling a successful lunar program on its own." Ok, I thought, tell that to China, Japan, and India, which seem to be doing pretty good so far. But then, after his joke, the real bombshell comes with his statement that Russia is "expecting to cooperate with the US in exploring the Earth's satellite." Say what? I thought we were supposed to be mad at each other, and that there were sanctions and all that. The remark is made all the more curious, in that the USA has no heavy lift vehicles capable of lunar missions, and is currently reliant upon private contractors (and Russia) to get anything from "down here" to "up there." So what's going on here? Did President Trump pull a leaf from President Kennedy's playbook, and quietly offer to have a joint lunar mission with Mr. Khrushche....er... I mean... Mr. Putin? Is this another subtle but tacit admission that there may be, and may have been, other technologies besides big bottle rockets in play? Or, conversely, is this another admission that there is a "deep fix in" to keep whatever happened(or didn't happen) with Project Apollo under firm Russo-American wraps?

Suspicion Three: That "deep fix" idea may not sound entirely plausible, until one recalls that curious circumstance that I mentioned back in 2006 in my book The SS Brotherhood of the Bell, namely, that when one looked at a table of Soviet and American lunar probe launches prior to Apollo, the one thing that becomes immediately apparent is the pattern: first the Soviets would launch a few probes, then go quiet. Then the Americans would launch a few probes, then go quiet, as the Soviets took their turn again, and so on. Back in the day, this was presented by American (and Soviet) media as a "space race." The coincidental pattern was just that: a coincidental pattern that resulted from the "race." In short, we were provided a narrative by which to interpret the data. But turn off the narrative being blocked and rathered by SeeBS News and Walter Concrete and Dan Blather for a moment, and just look at the pattern itself, and there's two basic ways, and not just one, to interpret that pattern: (1) it's a coincidence resulting from the "race," or (2) it's the result of deeper coordination between the two programs. And if we really want to cook this particular suspicion casserole, throw in a little sauce de Alternative Three, where that idea of hidden coordination was first broached in the late 1970s by a major western television outlet: Britain's East Anglia television. That idea may not qualify as a secret space program as such, but it is at least a "secret international coordination of public space programs" that's worth entertaining over a plate of blue chicken wings. As I put it in the book, that hypothesis would have required the presence in both countries of people that could pull off such coordination, and there was only one group of people with such a heavy presence (at least, initially) in both countries' space programs...

Suspicion Four: The Business Insider version of this story adds that the Soviet Union abandoned its manned lunar missions after four of its enormous Saturn-V-sized boosters exploded on their test launches, and that a 2015 investigation on the lunar landings was called for. I've no doubt that such an investigation was probably underway throughout the entire Apollo program, and probably reached a very fevered pitch from Apollo 8 onwards, and that those investigations might have included investigations of the Soviet launch failures, which could very well have been sabotage. So what, exactly, was the 2015 call within Russia for an investigation? More message sending, perhaps, that they were going to reveal the results of those classified KGB studies and analyses under the guise of a new investigation?

The bottom line here, for me at least, is that messages are definitely being sent. The difficulty is, what is the message, and to whom is it being sent?

See you on the flip side...