Ken Johnston
Ralph K. Johnston (now using the forename Ken) is a retired aerospace worker, ex-US Marine cadet and so-called "NASA Whistleblower." His principal claim to fame within the NASA-hating community is that he refused to follow orders and destroy a nearly-complete collection of 10"x8" glossy photoprints from the Apollo program.
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[edit] Career
Johnston was born in Hart, Texas in 1943, and studied at Oklahoma City University. He enlisted in the US Marines in August 1962 and reported to Pensacola as a Marine cadet for flight training in September 1964. He left the Marines in August 1966.
As a qualified avionics technician, Johnston was hired by Grumman Aircraft, principal contractor for the Apollo Lunar Module, to assist with cockpit and instrument development and training, in Houston. He has described his status at that time as a "civilian astronaut consultant pilot."
From 1969 to 1972, during the Apollo Program, he was employed by Brown & Root, principal contractors to NASA for management of the Lunar Receiving Laboratory, where all the moonrocks were stored, curated, catalogued and in some cases distributed to scientists who had successfully applied to carry out analysis in their own labs. An important part of Johnston's duty was to package and ship lunar samples to science labs, together with photographs documenting their exact location and orientation in situ. As such, he had in his office several sets of photographs taken by Apollo astronauts with their chest-mounted Hasselblad cameras. When the moonrock distribution wound down, he was instructed by Bud Laskawa, his boss, to destroy what remained of the photo archive, but he kept one set as a personal collection.
Johnston applied to NASA for the 1977 astronaut selection for duty as a Space Shuttle astronaut, but was turned down on the basis of inadequate academic qualifications. The ideal astronaut was no longer a jet-jock, but a highly educated person with useful skills. Accordingly, Johnston obtained a Ph.D. in Metaphysics from the Reform Baptist Theological Seminary in Denver, CO., and began using the title "Dr. Johnston"[1] However, by the time NASA was recruiting again, Johnston says he was considered too old. He did, however, join NASA's educational outreach program as a "Solar System Ambassador" -- a purely voluntary appointment.
[edit] Mars One
In mid-2013, Johnston was one of the 2,761 applicants for the one-way-only trip to Mars, offered by the Mars One[wp] project.[2] He was short-listed as one of 1,058 "quarter-finalists" on 30 December 2013,[3] but failed to make the 100 cut in February 2015.[4][5]
[edit] Controversy
In early 1995, Johnston attended a lecture in Seattle by the pseudoscientist Richard Hoagland. After the lecture, he introduced himself and asked if Hoagland would be interested in his Apollo photograph collection, which he described as "unique." Indeed Hoagland was, and they went through the collection together the next day. Hoagland later wrote (of himself, in the third person):
| That the extremely limited number of high-quality, first or second generation copies of the unique photographic record of Man's first voyages to the Moon could be so blithely ... destroyed ... infuriated him almost beyond words ... Hoagland finally had his "smoking gun." — Hoagland 2007, p.218 |
[edit] The photographs
These photographs were not first generation, and may not even be second generation. Those materials were archived in a completely different building in the Space Center. They are not unique -- to this very day, anyone with a few dollars to spend can request a very high-definition scan of any of them, from the camera negative (if monochrome) or the internegative (if color).[6] So it makes no sense to call the availability of this material "extremely limited." Hoagland also wrote:
| In scanning Ken's priceless Apollo 14 C-prints, [I'd] discovered that the computer could "see" what the human eye could not—incredible geometric detail in the pitch black areas, like the lunar sky. The sensitivity of modern CCD imaging technology, in even commercially-available image scanners, coupled with the amazing enhancement capabilities of state-of-the-art commercial software—like Adobe's Photoshop—allowed the invisible detail buried in these supposedly black layers, of these thirty-year-old emulsions, to ultimately be revealed—a "democratization" of technology that no censor at NASA could have possibly foreseen over more than thirty years. — Hoagland 2007, p.226 |
That statement is absolute poppycock a misunderstanding. Of course scanning can not reveal "invisible detail" if it truly is invisible. Hoagland has made a career out of trumpeting the fact that his scans of Ken Johnston's collection show things that the "official" scans do not. But of course, he's comparing, on the one hand, a professionally scanned image from an original negative or internegative done in a clean room -- and on the other hand, a photoprint stored in a ring binder for 23 years, then pulled out and scanned on Hoagland's office scanner, the glass of which is quite clearly contaminated.[7] For use as Powerpoint™ slides, Hoagland typically slams up the brightness--a procedure guaranteed to reveal any scanner contamination wherever the image is black.
[edit] Johnston's curriculum vitae
It seems that Hoagland somewhat oversold his source. In the first edition of Dark Mission, he wrote this about Ken Johnston:
| "In early 1995, Hoagland was on a lecture tour in Seattle. It was then that he met Ken Johnston-a Boeing engineer at the time, and a former fighter-jock and test pilot for Grumman Aerospace. After his tour of duty in the Marines as an F-4 pilot, Johnston had gone to work at NASA in the mid-1960s as the chief Lunar Module test pilot at the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston. — Dark Mission First edition, 2007 |
By the second edition, after some investigation by the space commentator James Oberg,[8] this had become:
| "In early 1995, Hoagland was on a lecture tour in Seattle. It was then that he met Ken Johnston-a Boeing engineer at the time, and a licensed pilot. After his tour of duty in the Marines where he trained in planes like the F-4 Phantom, Johnston had gone to work at NASA in the mid-1960s under a contract to Grumman Aerospace at the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston. — Dark Mission Second edition, 2009 |
It's not clear whose face the egg was on -- Johnston's or Hoagland's. Maybe both. At any rate, this controversy ended up getting Johnston dropped from the "Solar System Ambassador" program, and thus was born the myth that he was "fired from NASA" for revealing things NASA would prefer to keep hidden. Hence his entirely unjustified reputation in pseudoscience circles as a hero and a whistleblower. Note that he was never at any time an employee of the Agency.
[edit] Bibliography
- Hoagland, Richard C.; Bara, Mike (2007,9). Dark Mission: The Secret History of NASA. Port Townsend: Feral House. ISBN 978-1-932-59526-0.
[edit] External links
- Johnston's video application to Mars One
- Another Mars One video
- Johnston at the Smithsonian, Sacred Mysteries video (1 of 2)
- Johnston at the Smithsonian, Sacred Mysteries video (2 of 2)
- Richard Hoagland introduces Ken Johnston at the National Press Club, 30 October 2007
- Dwayne Day's sarcastic comment on the above event (very funny)
[edit] Footnotes
- ↑ Details from an investigation by James Oberg.
- ↑ Boyle, Alan (9 September 2013). "More than 2,700 pay up for a chance to take a one-way trip to Mars". http://www.nbcnews.com/science/more-2-700-pay-chance-take-one-way-trip-mars-8C11115364. Retrieved 4 December 2013.
- ↑ Ken Johnston announces his preliminary selection on Coast to Coast AM 8 January 2014
- ↑ "Mars One Announces Round Three Astronaut Candidates"
- ↑ Even if he'd been selected for the very first expedition, he would have been 81 years old
- ↑ ref. JSC Digital Image Collection
- ↑ In some of his scans, fibers and hairs can be seen. Here, for example
- ↑ See this thread on the Unexplained Mysteries forum, January 2009