NICAP, however, had the last word. Preliminary tests by their chemist had shown that the cakes contained a common type of hydrogenated oil shortening that melted at body temperature. Further tests were temporarily delayed because of the expense. However, NICAP assured the judge, the tests would be completed sometime, and any fragments left over would be saved and returned![[XI-15]]
The Moon Bridge
On the evening of July 29, 1953, Mr. J. J. O’Neill, a science reporter for the New York Herald Tribune, was looking at the moon through his small telescope when he saw what he believed to be a shaft of light shining from the mountainous ridge above the Mare Crisium crater and fanning out into the shadowed area of the crater wall. According to his interpretation, the light was coming from underneath a new structure, a gigantic natural bridge twelve to twenty miles long that arched over a gap in the mountainous rim. This region of the moon had been thoroughly studied and mapped during the previous century and no such feature had ever been noticed. The sudden appearance of so spectacular an object, if true, would indeed require explanation. Alerted by news reports of the moon bridge, a British amateur astronomer, H. P. Wilkins, reported a few weeks later that he, too, could see the mysterious arch through his telescope (see [Figure 16]).
To saucer enthusiasts these reports constituted proof that the moon was inhabited. Since Nature alone could not have formed such an arch in so short a time, they argued, the bridge must be artificial. The structure might have been built by creatures living on the moon, perhaps in enormous underground cities. These beings might be native Selenites, or they might be colonists from Mars or from planets belonging to another solar system who were using the moon as a base for their spaceships[XI-16].
Figure 16. The “Moon Bridge.” A, Just before sunset light fans out from beneath “arch”; B, the fan narrows as sun sinks lower; C, fan begins to disappear as sun sets below horizon. (Based on sketches by the late H. P. Wilkins.)
Professional astronomers, queried about the mysterious bridge, pointed out that sunlight could not have produced the phenomenon in the way described. When a bright lamp shines through an open doorway into a darkened room, the light spreads out like a fan into the shadowed area because the light source is very near. But the supposed light source in this case was the far-distant sun. If a shaft of sunlight were shining under a huge lunar arch, as claimed, the opposite boundaries of the illuminated area would be essentially parallel, not divergent like the fan-shaped region described. Examining the Mare Crisium wall through the fifteen-inch Harvard telescope, Dr. Menzel (who was therefore labeled “one of the Army stooges”[[XI-16a]]) concluded that the bright area observed by the amateurs must have been a high plateau that was still illuminated by the setting sun while the rest of the crater wall was already in darkness. The roughly curved boundary of the illuminated plateau, seen against the shadowed mountains, had been mistakenly interpreted as a bridge. Dr. G. P. Kuiper, one of the world’s leading authorities on the moon, also studied the area with the eighty-two-inch reflecting telescope at the McDonald Observatory, and reached the same conclusion.
One writer offered further proof (derived from an unnamed source) for the reality of the new bridge. Astronomers at Mount Palomar Observatory, he asserted, had made a secret study that confirmed the presence of the structure; furthermore a spectrographic analysis was supposed to have proved that the bridge was made of metal[XI-16].
Sensible comment on these statements is not easy. A “secret” study would be impossible since the moon’s face is obviously open to all viewers, and the purported chemical analysis is sheer nonsense. The spectroscope can tell the physicist what luminous gases are present in the atmosphere around a heavenly body, but it cannot reveal the composition of a solid object on the surface of the body, unless the object is first heated until it vaporizes and is transformed into gas. Before a physicist could make a spectrographic analysis of the alleged lunar structure, he would have to land on the moon and chip off a piece of the “bridge” itself.