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The story about the Apollo 11 astronauts giving a fake moon rock to former Prime Minister
of The Netherlands, Willem Drees, overlooks one important fact.
That is that the astronauts did not hand out ANY lunar samples on their Goodwill tour in
October 1969.
The only moon rock not at the Lunar Receiving Laboratory (LRL) or in the hands of the primary
investigators at that time was on display at the Smithsonian.
Nixon didn’t request the construction of the Apollo 11 gift displays - containing the
lunar material and flags that flew to the moon - until November 1969, after the Goodwill
tour had ended.
The Apollo 11 lunar display intended for The Netherlands was given to their official head
of state, Queen Juliana, no earlier than January 1970.
She then donated the prized gift to the Boerhaave museum in Leiden on February 2, 1970, where,
in 2009, it was pulled out of storage and put on display to celebrate the 40th anniversary
of Apollo 11.
The inscription on the gift display presented to The Netherlands says:
Presented to the People of The Netherlands by Richard Nixon, President of the United
States of America.
This Flag of Your Nation was carried to the Moon and Back by Apollo 11 and This Fragment
of the Moon's Surface was brought to Earth by the Crew of That First Manned Lunar Landing.
All 250 displays have a similar inscription with different recipients’ names of course.
So if this is the lunar sample that was officially given to The Netherlands, then where did the
Drees rock come from?
Well, let’s take a closer look at what we actually know and see if anything makes sense.
First, consider that the Drees rock, weighing in at 89 grams, is about twice as massive
as ALL 250 gifted lunar samples from Apollo 11 combined.
The Nixon administration had to literally pull teeth to get the 50 grams of lunar material
for the displays because Elbert King at NASA only wanted to put the lunar samples into
the hands of real scientists for scientific investigation.
As Arno Wielders noted, why would NASA literally throw away one of their first and few moon
rocks - something that had immeasurable scientific value?
Consider what we can confirm was actually gifted to 135 nations, including The Netherlands.
All these nations received nearly identical gift displays.
They all have a Lucite disk containing a lunar sample.
They all have a flag of their nation that was flown to the moon.
And they all have an inscription saying (A) they contain lunar material and
(B) they were given to the people of the receiving entity from President Nixon.
In other words, the inscription identifies the item gifted, the benefactor and the recipient.
These were gifts from one head of state to another.
The card now associated with the Drees rock says it’s from Middendorf but it doesn’t
mention anything about a rock, let alone a moon rock.
It doesn’t even mention the recipient by name.
It’s a generic souvenir card that simply advertises the benefactor and the venue.
It’s basically an advertisement.
Originally, it could have just as easily been associated with an autographed picture of
the Apollo 11 mission, which the U.S. diplomatic corps handed out to even lesser dignitaries,
like Drees, during - and after - the Goodwill Tour.
Consider that NASA protected both the Apollo 11 lunar samples and the Apollo 17 Goodwill
rocks by encapsulating them in Lucite to protect them from the environment.
Why would NASA be so careless as to let the Drees rock slip out of their hands without
dipping it in Lucite or even enclosing it in a glass nitrogen bell?
Consider that the Apollo 11 astronauts were only in Amsterdam for a few hours on
October 9, 1969.
All the while, they were busy shaking hands and meeting with dignitaries.
Practically every move they made was scrutinized by cameras.
If their presentation of a replica of a plaque and a goodwill-message disk to Queen Juliana
was recorded, then why didn’t the presentation of a moon rock to Drees draw equal attention?
Why didn't the astronauts present the rock to Drees themselves?
The only way I can think to explain this, is that perhaps the astronauts were unable
to meet up with Drees during their visit because the then-FORMER Prime Minister was busy doing
something more important than meeting with the only two men on earth who had ever walked
on the moon and receiving the one-and-only moon rock that the astronauts handed out on
their tour.
How else would Middendorf end up with the rock to pass on to Drees later that same day
back at the RAI Congress Center?
Luckily, Middendorf just happened to have a mass-produced card already typeset and printed
to give with the rock because the astronauts forgot to bring one with them.
And why was it more important to mention on the card where and when the gift was given
than what was given and to whom?
You also have to wonder why the astronauts would give Queen Juliana, the true head-of-state,
relatively cheap trinkets, then totally ignore the then-current Prime Minister, Piet de Jong,
and then hand Ambassador Middendorf a relatively huge, invaluable rock to pass on as a private
gift to a then-former Prime Minister like Willem Drees.
Did Drees win a lottery or something?
Perhaps the astronauts were afraid that if they gave the rock directly to Drees publicly,
they would hurt Queen Juliana’s feelings.
But, how would the astronauts expect Queen Juliana not to find out about their gift to
Drees?
Did they try to keep it a secret?
If not, it must have been a major insult when a button containing a few specs of moon dust
showed up in Queen Juliana’s mail a couple of months later.
And when Middendorf brought a REAL moon rock to the Palace at a private reception for select
guests, and the press, in January 1970, why didn’t they invite Drees to bring his much
larger rock over so they could compare the two?
Could this real moon rock have been the “little piece of stone” that Middendorf remembered
receiving from the State Department, not the astronauts, which Drees was so interested in?
And the most curious facet of this whole Drees rock story is that of all the people in the
world to present this special gift to, why Drees?
Where’s the quid-pro-quo - the ***-for-tat?
What could NASA possibly expect in return?
Of what importance was Willem Drees to the United States or to NASA at that time?
I can think of dozens of world leaders that the U.S. would have been better off trying
to influence by giving them a chunk of the moon than one of the seven then-living, retired
Prime Ministers of The Netherlands.
It just doesn’t make sense, does it?
Consider that the Drees rock was first assumed to be a moon rock by Drees’ heirs.
They are the ones who first connected the rock to the card.
If the rock WAS a gift to Drees from Middendorf, it’s totally plausible that the rock was
a joke between the two.
Especially when you consider the irony of Middendorf knowingly giving a chunk of petrified
wood from Barry Goldwater’s home state to a former Prime Minister of a country that
most of the world nostalgically associates with wooden shoes.
The boys at NASA would have known that a chunk of lava from Hawaii looks more like a moon
rock than a piece of petrified wood from Arizona.
Consider motive.
Why would NASA try to pass off a piece of petrified wood as one of their lunar samples?
Why would NASA, or the Apollo 11 astronauts for that matter, attempt to pull a fast one
over on an elderly retired statesman from The Netherlands?
Also consider that the Drees rock obviously did not come from NASA’s collection, because
it doesn’t resemble anything the Apollo 11 astronauts brought back with them from
the moon.
A record was made of every lunar sample during the preliminary examination stage.
Each sample was photographed, weighed and measured.
Nothing resembling the Drees rock is in the Apollo 11 Sample Catalog or the Lunar Sample
Compendium.
The Drees rock is closest in weight to Sample 10022, a basalt rock.
The Drees rock is quartz and there are no quartz stones listed among the Apollo 11 samples.
There were 19 basalts, 30 breccias, and a one-pound gabbro, but no quartz.
So, how do we explain all this?
How do we explain the astronauts supposedly slipping a fake moon rock to Middendorf, when
Middendorf remembers receiving a real moon rock from the State Department?
How do we explain the press taking such interest in the astronauts giving a bucketful of relatively
cheap gifts to HRH Queen Juliana and to lesser dignitaries such as Ivo Samkalden, Mayor of
Amsterdam, and yet the presentation of a moon rock to an elderly retired statesman totally
escaped the public eye?
And how do we explain the fact that nothing resembling the 89 gram Drees rock was catalogued
by the LRL and as many as 135 major world leaders received only about a fifth of a gram
of moon dust?
Once you examine the facts, the Drees moon rock story becomes rather hard to believe,
doesn't it?
Ciao moon hoax conspirators, wherever you are.