The "C" on the rock confirmed – again!
The definitive refutation of Steve Troy’s hair-brained claim
Writing on the Rocks
Whilst working on his book NASA Mooned America!, Ralph René sent out a request to NASA Headquarters in Washington DC for three 8x10inch colour glossy photographs from the Apollo missions. After eighteen months and countless telephone calls, they finally sent the pictures that he ordered. Among them was AS16-107-17446 [Fig. 1]. René originally cited this photograph for anomalies such as unparallel shadows and the abrupt end between the foreground and background – suggesting a film set backdrop. But upon the original release of the book, a friend’s daughter pointed out another anomaly.1 Subsequent editions of NASA Mooned America! included mention of it.
Fig 1. AS16-107-17446 with its now infamous “C” on the rock.
René wrote:
The large rock in the left foreground is clearly marked with a big capital "C". The bottom right corner has a crease similar to that caused by wetting a folded newspaper. This makes it a showbiz "flap" rock, which the people who work in Hollywood studios throw at visitors. They used to be made from wet newspaper and paste and showed similar flaps. Stage rocks are usually placed by stage hands over similarly lettered markers positioned by the set designer.2
As if to reinforce this conviction, Mary Bennett and David Percy noted a second letter “C” in the picture, written in the dirt just below the C-rock.3 This has led many, myself included, to suspect that this second “C” is the marker over which the stage hands were supposed to position the rock. Whether an intentional blow of the whistle or just by mistake, the stagehand apparently positioned the rock incorrectly, such that both the “C” on the rock and the C-marker on the ground remained visible.
Fig 2. Close up on the “C” on the rock and the “C” mark on the ground.
Theories differed among investigators as to why the “C” on the rock was left visible. René had always suspected that the stagehand had left the "C" exposed due to sheer incompetence. Others have suggested that the C-rock was accidentally knocked over by the Rover, given that the C-rock lies between the Rover tracks. Indeed, René had noticed that the rover tracks made a sharp right-angle turn and it “looks like stage hands lifted up the front and dragged the Rover around to the left just before this picture was taken.”
Bennett and Percy on the other hand suggest the visibility of the “C” was intentional. A cryptic hidden clue left on set to highlight the Apollo image fakery. In 2000, they noted that shadows cast by the rocks on the right of the photograph not only skew away from the direction of the Rover’s shadow, but they also seem to point towards the C-rock – as if the set had been lit to specifically bring the rock to the viewer’s attention. More recently, Bennett and Percy have noted that the very positioning of the rock itself may be intentional. If an 8x8 grid is overlayed on top of AS17-107-17446, we can see that two-thirds of the C-rock occupies the square that corresponds to sector c3 on a chessboard. Starting a game of chess by moving a pawn to square c3 is called a Saragossa opening, a more irregular opening for any chess player. While possibly at the same time a tip of the hat to the Saragossa Air Base, which the US Air Force used during the Apollo program.
Fig 3. The Saragossa opening – pawn to c3 – two-thirds of the ‘C’ rock is in sector c3, more info here.
Intentional or otherwise, the fact remains there is a “C” written on the rock. Suspecting that NASA would try to “lose” the anomalous Apollo photos after the release of his book in 1992, René tried ordering duplicates of the photos he used. But instead of sending him the images he requested, they sent him three random Apollo pictures he did not order. Upon returning them for either refund or replacement, René was told that NASA had changed the numbering system and he would need to fill out a new request with the updated image numbers. NASA could not supply him with a cross-over index, claiming they “lost” it.
Later in 1999, René tried again. This time he was informed that Bara-King Studios in Maryland handled the sale of NASA photos. Still unable to get the updated numbers, René sent the subsidiary black and white scans of the photos he wanted.
As René wrote in an appendix of newer editions of his book:
They sent me the right photos. However, the photos were not 8 by 10 optical quality glossy full color photos. Instead, they were computer derived showing grainy, blurred colors. In addition, the "C" on the rock had been brushed out, and the size reduced to 6.75 by 7 inches [emphasis added].
It appears that NASA has since switched back to using the original numbers, and high-resolution scans of the photos can be found on the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal (ALSJ) and Apollo Archive websites. But although their copies of AS16-107-17446 still lack the “C” on the rock, the “C” on the ground remains.
Fig 4. AS16-107-17446 as seen on the ALSJ and Apollo Archive website.
The most 'hair-brained' excuse in history
In 2001, Steve Troy of the now deleted Lunar Anomalies website, published an article in which he claimed to have examined master negatives and prints from Johnson Spaceflight Center (JSC) and the Lunar & Planetary Institute (LPI) in Houston and the National Space Science Data Center (NSSDC) in Maryland, and traced the "C" to a later generation print made by the LPI.4
Troy concluded that the "C" was just a hair on the negative. In an attempt to substantiate this excuse, he also claimed that a 4x enlargement of the "C" reveals the ‘hair’ to be casting a shadow on the photographic plate. This ‘shadow’ is nothing more than the thickening of the marker pen trail that was used to label the papier-mâché rock. As anybody who has used a marker pen should know, the tip is slanted and ink trails will come out thinner or thicker depending on which side was pressing on the paper whilst writing. Such trails may even come out partially transparent.
Fig 5. A comparison of marker pen writing with Steve Troy’s enlargement of the “C”. Troy claims the upper part of the “C” is a hair casting a shadow. This is obviously just an uneven spreading of the marker pen ink trail. Pareidolia much?
It is at this point I feel the need to provide some context as to who came up with this hair-on-the-negative nonsense. The website Lunar Anomalies was run, not only by Steve Troy, but also Michael Bara and Richard Hoagland, and was dedicated to posting many absurd claims that pictures from Lunar Orbiter, Ranger and Apollo show evidence of ancient alien civilizations. Lunar Anomalies falsely claimed that there are remnants of glass domes over Copernicus and Tycho crater; that obvious hills and mountains are artificial structures; and that obvious ejecta material surrounding lunar craters are ancient ruins. While the website also had a section intended to ‘debunk’ the Apollo hoax theory, such nonsensical claims about ancient alien artifacts permeate throughout.
Which leads me to THE most preposterous “debunk” that I have ever heard. It was made in response to Bennett and Percy's argument that many Apollo lunar surface telecasts show an incredibly large 'Sun' being reflected in the astronauts’ visors, suggesting a large and close artificial light source, while on the Gemini and Shuttle missions the Sun’s reflection is noticeably tinier. In response Troy, Hoagland and Bara claimed:
Our explanation for this remarkable observation is firmly grounded in our investigation of the REAL conspiracy that NASA has worked so hard, for over 40 years, to cover-up: the presence of ancient, glass-like ruins on the Moon. It is these ruins, sticking up above the lunar horizon and physically intervening between the low-angle sun and the Apollo astronauts roaming across the surface, which create the magnified halo of scattered light seen in the gold visors [emphasis NOT added].5
After reading that, I have no idea how anybody could take anything Troy and company said in defence of the Apollo missions seriously. Let alone turn one of his literal hair-brained excuses into a major falsehood that lasted for over twenty years. Yet that is exactly what has happened.
This erroneous claim that the “C” is just a hair on the negative appeared almost verbatim on Jay Windley’s Clavius website:
In 2001 Steve Troy of Lunaranomalies.com undertook a lengthy investigation. After obtaining transparencies from different sources connected with NASA, he failed to see the mark either on the masters used prior to 1997 or on the new masters. Yet the photos on official NASA web sites clearly show it. Following up with the Lunar and Planetary Institute (LPI) in Houston, they discovered that one of the prints in their collection was the source of the mark. At some point that print had been scanned and has since been widely distributed on the Internet. Troy and LPI officials studied the print under a microscope and discovered that it was indeed far more likely to be a hair or other fiber on the photographic paper onto which AS16-107-17446 had been printed.6
Windley discretely neglected to mention the content usually found on the Lunar Anomalies website, giving the reader a false impression that it was a reputable Apollo hoax debunking website.
Robert Braeunig also flogged this hair-on-the-negative nonsense and cited Troy as his source:
An investigation by the Lunar Anomalies Web page has uncovered that the "C" is, in fact, no more than a hair or fiber that was likely on the paper when the print was made. This print was then scanned to produce the digital image seen on this, and other, Web pages. The original negatives have been found to be "clean" with no evidence of the infamous "C".7
Like Windley, Braeunig also didn’t tell his readers that Lunar Anomalies is not a credible source. At least not in the relevant C-rock section. One had to scroll all the way down to the bottom of his lengthy webpage to the Links section before they got such a disclaimer:
Lunar Anomalies does a very good job of debunking the Moon hoax theory, but the authors also believe Apollo astronauts uncovered ancient extraterrestrial artifacts on the Moon, which is a conspiracy theory that I choose not to delve into.
Braeunig later removed this disclaimer.8 Probably to make his reference appear more credible than it was.
The hair-on-the-negative nonsense has since appeared in countless news articles and Apollo hoax ‘debunk’ websites and videos on YouTube.9,10,11 But the most egregious of this mindless parroting must come from Phil Plait of the Bad Astronomy website. Plait has no hesitation calling Hoagland out on the ridiculousness of his ancient lunar alien bases claims – and rightly so, I might add. But he also has no hesitations plagiarizing Troy’s hair-on-the-negative excuse in television and radio interviews, often without stating the source.
On the Penn & Teller Bullsh!t special on conspiracy theories, Plait stated:
This is just a hair that got caught in the negative when they were making prints of this picture. In the original negative you can see that that rock is not labeled “C”, the hair wasn't in there. So, this is just a ridiculous claim.
'Ridiculous' is how I would describe Plait’s shameless parroting of Troy’s dubious excuse. Neither Plait, nor Windley, nor any one of these individuals has attempted to do the most obvious thing: track down the earliest known prints of the image to prove or disprove Troy’s claim that the “C” on the rock was not there originally.
That is what we are going to do in this article.
C marks the Starting Spot
I brought this hair-on-the-negative excuse to Ralph René’s attention. He told me that AS16-107-17446 appears in The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Space Technology by Kenneth Gatland, published in 1981, and “the same C-rock is visible as hell.” Sure enough, the book does indeed show the C-rock on page 164. Even more conclusively, the copy of the photo contained therein is NOT from the LPI’s archive. In the Acknowledgements, Gatland writes: “We are especially grateful to Les Gaver and his colleagues in the Audio-Visual Department at NASA Headquarters in Washington, DC, who supplied a superb selection of photographs.”12 This is the ONLY credit given for the NASA photos used in the book. Later, in the index, NASA is specifically credited for the photos printed on page 164. Meaning that Gatland did not get his copy of the C-rock photo from the LPI, but NASA Headquarters – the same place where René ordered his copy.
Fig 6. Cover of The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Space Technology, published in 1981.
Fig 7. The C-rock on page 164 of the Illustrated Encyclopedia of Space Technology.
This became the subject matter of my video MoonFaker: Rocks & Crocks published in 2008. Since making that video, I have also acquired a copy of APOLLO: The Apollo Story: A pictorial tribute to the men who conquered space and the moon, by Victor Briggs with an introduction by Peter Fairley. This book was published in 1972 at some point between Apollo 16 and 17. The “C” on the rock in all its glory appears on page 121. On the inner cover, Briggs writes: “The Publishers are grateful to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Washington DC, without whose co-operation in providing photographs, this book would not have been possible.”13
Fig 8. The superfluously-titled APOLLO: The Apollo Story, published in 1972 – which also contained the C-rock image.
Fig 9. The C-rock on page 121 of APOLLO: The Apollo Story.
Once again, this copy of the C-rock photo is traced back, not to the LPI, but to NASA Headquarters in Washington DC – whose website now hosts the C-less copies for the ALSJ and Apollo Archive websites. This means that the “C” was visible on the rock in 1972. As I stated back in 2008: when we have two identical photographs from an identical source and both are said to be the originals, we must conclude that the earlier release of these two photographs is the one true original.
Fig. 10. Photograph of both publications showing the “C” on the rock APOLLO: The Apollo Story (left) and The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Space Technology (right). Click to enlarge.
Propagandists have since attempted to one-up my exposé. In recent years, many of them have cited the fact that AS16-107-17446 apparently made the front page of the May 8, 1972 printing of Aviation Week & Space Technology, with a headline: ‘First Apollo 16 Photos’.14 The “C” on the rock is absent. While many propagandists have flogged this front page on their websites, forums and YouTube videos as “proof” that the “C” was not there originally, Aviation Week & Space Technology is NOT the first publication to feature AS16-107-17446.
Fig 11. The front page of the May 8, 1972 edition of Aviation Week & Space Technology – looks like NASA acted fast to airbrush out the “C” [see below for proof of such].
To investigate this counterclaim, I looked through library microfilms of archived newspapers. And I learned that AS16-107-17446 was featured in at least two Australian newspapers published on May 3, 1972: page 3 of The Canberra Times;15 and page 19 of The Sydney Morning Herald.16 It is important to note that newspapers are always printed the night before release, which in this case would be May 2, 1972. And because of the time differences between the United States and Australia, this means the photo was first released on May 1, 1972.
Fig 12. The May 3, 1972 printing of The Canberra Times. This microfilm lacks sufficient resolution to see the “C”. Even the American flag on the back of Charles Duke’s spacesuit doesn’t appear.
Unfortunately, in microfilm archival, the text takes precedence over the pictures therein. And so, the microfilms I was able to examine lacked the clarity to determine if the “C” was on the rock. But they did put me on the right trail. The Canberra Times photograph is captioned:
Astronaut Charles Duke, the Apollo 16 lunar module pilot, stands beside the lunar rover vehicle at Station 4, near Stone Mountain, on April 22. The Palmetto crater can be seen at the top of the picture. Large moon rocks and the gnomon used to establish the sun's angle, scale and lunar colour are in the foreground – AAP-AP cable picture.
AAP means Australian Associated Press. And by ‘AP cable picture’, they would mean Associated Press Wirephoto. Back in 1972, the only way to receive pictures was by either sending them in the mail, which would take days or weeks or even months to deliver; or by scanning the picture and transmitting it over telephone wires and radio. Essentially a precursor to fax machines.
In the mainstream media, Associated Press Wirephoto was the gold standard for delivering photos of news events to the worldwide media outlets in time to meet the printing deadline. Anything more than a day old would not be considered news! Associated Press would either develop their own photos or receive them from a third party; sticky tape a caption with credits and relevant information to the photo; and then coil the picture around a rotating cylinder with an optical scanner fixed in place. With the scanner activated, the cylinder would rotate around and around allowing it to scan the picture from top to bottom as one long image strip, which would then be sent over the telephone and reconstructed at the receiving end.17,18
With the internet having rendered Wirephoto obsolete, many of these old press photos have been popping up for sale online. By pure chance, in June 2023, I found just such a press photo for AS16-107-17446 on ebay.19 It was sold by Historic Images, a company that specializes in the sale of rare photographs and news materials of historical significance. When I saw what they were selling, I knew I HAD to obtain it. After a brief bidding war which necessitated me to place an obscene $900+ maximum bid (thankfully the final bid was only $78.99), the Press Photo was mine.
Fig 13. Screenshot of ebay auction for the Associated Press Wirephoto release of AS16-107-17446, dated May 1, 1972. Click to enlarge.
Fig 14. Enlargement of the auction preview image. Hey, what’s that written on the rock? Click to enlarge.
There can be no doubt about it: the AS16-107-17446 press photo clearly shows the “C” on the rock. And it is captioned:
17446
The caption is virtually identical to that of The Canberra Times. This wirephoto can no doubt be the picture that Associated Press sent them. More importantly it puts the whole matter to rest once and for all. “MSC14-May 1” says all that needs to be said. MSC stands for Manned Spaceflight Center, now the Johnson Spaceflight Center. The 14 means it is the 14th image that MSC sent out to the Associated Press that day. Meaning that this photo, clearly showing the C-rock and clearly dated May 1, 1972, came from the NASA Manned Spaceflight Center, NOT the Lunar and Planetary Institute. Yet in his now deleted article, Troy claimed: "The person we talked to at JSC told us he had no control over getting the [NASA website] image replaced by a clean one or removed, but he assured us that their prints didn’t bear this mark." Clearly, this claim is false.
We can also rule out Associate Press’ optical scanner as responsible for adding the “C”, because this scan is in black-and-white, and the “C” appears in the colour photos. Such as the colour copies that NASA Headquarters sent to Briggs, Gatland and René respectively. Colour wirephotos were extraordinarily uncommon back then, taking three times longer than black-and-white to transmit. Even by 1979, less than 12% of all American newspapers even printed elements of their pages in colour. For those reasons, colour wirephotos were only sent if the prestigiousness of the news event necessitated them.20, 21 Public interest in the Moon landings had waned by Apollo 16, so the release of yet more lunar pictures wouldn’t have necessitated colour wirephotos. Besides which, it doesn’t make sense. NASA owns the originals, why would they keep an Associated Press scan in their archives?
Fig 15. A picture says a thousand words, but this one just says “GOTCHYA, PROPAGANDISTS!” Click to enlarge.
In the light of this piece of physical evidence we can only conclude that the “C” on the rock WAS there originally, and the “C” was NOT the result of a stray hair caught on the negative when the LPI was making later generation prints of the photo. Given that the May 1st Associate Press release clearly shows the “C” – while the later version published in the May 8th edition of Aviation Week & Space Technology does not – it must be the case that NASA noticed the “C” on the rock and airbrushed it out between those two dates.
Why the copy with the incriminating “C” continued to appear in NASA’s archives for some time is unclear. But given that the earliest known copy with the “C” on the rock clearly came from MSC, it can be stated with confidence that Steve Troy’s claim about the “C” being a later generation LPI misprint, is both unsubstantiated and, ironically, 'hair-brained'!
Jarrah White
Aulis Online, July 2023
Postscript
The question of why NASA Headquarters continued to release copies of AS16-107-17446 with the “C” after May 8, 1972, kept gnawing at my mind since this column was first published. And not just NASA Headquarters. Vintage colour and black and white prints made by MSC before and after they became JSC in 1973 can be found in auctions and in Google Images searches, such as this black and white print bearing the NASA ‘worm’ logo used between 1975 and 1992. But upon further investigating, I believe the answer lies in how NASA distributed Apollo photographs internally.
The original Hasselblad 70mm film magazines from each Apollo mission were taken to MSC's Photography Technological Lab (PTL) located at Building 8. There they were processed under utmost controlled conditions. Thereby eliminating any possibility of dust, dirt or scratches adhering to the film surface. Temperature and humidity of the lab was kept such that the film would neither expand or shrink, and the technicians even took the extra step of decontaminating the film before development.
John W. Holland, NASA’s Photographic Division Chief of Technical Laboratory Branch, explained in his Oral History interview how the film was processed at PTL and ultimately distributed:
From the original film, duplicate masters were produced and the original film secured. We tried not to use the original film unless special requirements were needed. From the masters, screening prints were made for the Public Affairs Office to view and select views for news releases. Duplicate negatives were made and used for printing; for example 8x10 color pictures or larger, color transparencies, slides, etc. […] All of the original film that went to the Moon was brought back to Building 8 at JSC and processed, duplicated and printed.
Holland’s account collaborates with my findings. The May 1 wirephoto is attributed to MSC, whose PTL printed the press releases from a master copy of the originals under ultra-clean lab conditions. And regarding duplicates of these masters, Kodak’s Global Product Manager Robert Shanebrook estimates that the PTL produced 100 or so copies, which were then sent to NASA’s various divisions who printed them for public distribution. Some of these master duplicates were given as gifts to NASA’s various contractors, including of course Kodak. Given that PTL went above and beyond to keep the originals, the masters and their duplicates clean and safe during the developing and duplication processes, it is doubtful that a hair could have found its way onto the any of them during said processes. And had a hair contaminated one of these 100 master duplicates during a single print run, it should not have reappeared in subsequent print runs made by different sources (i.e. MSC/JSC in Houston and NASA Headquarters in Washington DC).
Because NASA had produced about 100 copies of the masters, the simplest answer for why the “C” continued to appear in prints after May 1972 is because there were so many unaltered copies it was not possible to track them all down and replace with an airbrushed version. Such unaltered master copies may have even survived thanks to one or several preservationists within NASA's various departments. This wouldn’t have been a first. For example, the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Program exists purely because Nancy Evans of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory had the foresight to save 2,500 reels of quadruplex from her superiors who ordered they be destroyed.
About the Author
Jarrah White is an Australian filmmaker, astrophysicist and geologist. He has Certificate III & IV qualifications with distinctions in Screen and Media at the Sydney Institute of TAFE NSW, Australia; and a BSc with a Major in Geology and a Minor in Astrophysics completed in November 2017 and July 2019 respectively.
Acknowledgements
With special thanks to Historic Images for providing this May 1, 1972, wirephoto proving the “C” was there right from the start. And to Pookie who first brought the “C” to Ralph René’s attention.
References
- J. White (2008) MoonFaker: Rocks & Crocks, JW Studios
- R. René (1992) “NASA Mooned America!” Self-published
- Mary Bennett, David S. Percy (1999) “Dark Moon: Apollo and the Whistle-Blowers”, Aulis Publishers
- S. Troy (2001) The Apollo “C-rock” Revealed, Lunar Anomalies
- M. Bara, S. Troy, R.C. Hoagland (2001) Who Mourns For Apollo? -- Or -- Was It Really Only a Paper Moon?, Lunar Anomalies (Archived)
- J. Windley, (2001) PHOTO ANALYSIS lunar rover, Clavius Moon Base
- R.A. Braunig (as seen March 2, 2013) DID WE LAND ON THE MOON? A Debunking of the Moon Hoax Theory, Rocket & Space Technology (Archived)
- R.A. Braunig (as seen April 13, 2013) DID WE LAND ON THE MOON? A Debunking of the Moon Hoax Theory, Rocket & Space Technology (Archived)
- The Guardian (2009) Top 10 Apollo hoax claims
- Nine News (2019) Was the Apollo 11 moon landing a hoax? No, but these conspiracy theories refuse to die
- J. Fernandez (2019) The Moon Conspiracy: Was it all faked? | ABC News”, YouTube
- K.W. Gatland, A.C. Clarke (1981) "The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Space Technology: A Comprehensive History of Space Exploration", Salamander Books, pp164
- V. Briggs, P Fairley (1972) "APOLLO: The Apollo Story: A pictorial tribute to the men who have conquered space and the moon", New English Library, pp121
- Aviation Week & Space Technology (May 8, 1972) A McGraw Hill Publication, cover
- The Canberra Times (May 3, 1972), p3
- The Sydney Morning Herald (May 3, 1972), p19
- M. Tramz (2015) Celebrating 80 Years of Associated Press' Wirephoto Time
- Spot News (1937) 1930s How Photographs Were Transmitted by Wire: Spot News (1937) - CharlieDeanArchives, YouTube
- Historic Images (2023) 1972 Press Photo Apollo 16 Astronaut Charles Duke Jr. walks on moon's surface, ebay
- G. Dell'Orto, V.L. Birchfield (2013) "Reporting at the Southern Borders: Journalism and Public Debates on Immigration in the U.S. and the E.U.", Taylor & Francis
- K.A. Hansen, N. Paul (2017) "Future-Proofing the News: Preserving the First Draft of History", Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
–
This article is licensed under
a Creative Commons License
