Today Boing-Boing posted a link to Feral House a non-fiction publisher of book whose themes are a swirl of sex, crime, conspiracy, satan and a touch of metal music.

Two of their books, Dark Mission and Sex and Rockets, jumped out at me given my recent penchant for anything at the intersection of the halcyon days of cold-war rocketry and sci-fi futurism, and my long stand fascination / amusement with conspiracies involving the Masons, O.T.O, The Golden Dawn or any of their occult ilk.

You should all take a look at the expert introduction from Dark Mission. I’ve read it and I suspect that reading the whole book is unlikely to convey any more then what’s here.

The authors thesis is that NASA was founded by occults and Nazis who were confident they would rapidly encounter extra-terrestrial life. These beliefs were laid out in a once secrete document produced by the Brookings Institute.

and, the whopper of all their claims…

“NASA would clandestinely confirm with these earliest robotic probes, and then proceed to cover up, the first awesome remains of a once-extraordinary,solar-system-wide, ancient technological civilization on the Moon—precisely as Brookings had predicted. Four years later, the Apollo Program would come to full fruition, and the lunar astronauts themselves would personally witness and extensively document, with tens of thousands of high quality
photographs, from both lunar orbit and the surface, extraordinary “glass-like” structures on the Moon! The Apollo crews would also bring back to NASA laboratories not just rocks, but actual samples of the ancient technologies they found—for highly classified efforts at ‘back engineering.’ ” (section 1:IV, my emphasis)

Their evidence seems to comes in typical conspiracy theory tropes:

Reliance on the interpretation of a single documentation as the foundation for further arguments: Like the Brookings document discussed above, which the authors tout as the cornerstone of their thesis. Relying on a single source to build an incredibly complicated theory is huge rhetorical weakness.

Numerology and coincidence with ancient religions: Any number or letter can be linked to a host of religions in any number of ways and never do these correlations constitute proof of anything. Yet, the authors make a great deal about the symbols on NASA mission patches claiming that the A on the Apollo patch is an …

“actual stand-in for “Asar”—the Egyptian designation for “Osiris.” This successful decoding of the hidden Egyptian meaning of the Apollo patch is redundantly confirmed—because “Asar/Osiris” is none other than the familiar Greek constellation of “Orion”—which is, of course, the background stellar constellation on the patch itself”

The notion that conspirators reveal their secrets on the most public emblems like master criminals dangling clues before the cops is silly. Real conspiracies succeed by staying secrete and not tagging everything with their symbols. Also, the idea that some grunt graphic designer was in with the conspiracy or even that one of the conspirators themselves designed the emblems is also unlikely. More likely the A stands for Apollo and the Orion constellation was chosen because it’s one of the biggest, most visible worldwide.

Recursive Conspiracy: Conspiracy theorists often link their pet conspiracy with other conspiracies I’d like to think it’s because they all attend the same circle-jerk but it’s likely because it provides the illusions of evidence. Establishing a relationship (even a solid one) between your bullshit and some one else’s bullshit does not get rid of the stink.

Accordingly, further evidence for this NASA theory comes from its connection to two other conspiracy: The Kennedy Assignation and the Fake Moon Landing.

They claim that Kennedy was killed two months after he attempted to initiate a joint space program with the USSR, a program which would have reveled to the world the secrets of the alien astronauts. This is just silly — everyone knows that Professor Plum killed Kennedy in the Drawing Room with a candle stick.

The authors also claim that the meme of a fake moon landing was purposely planted by the head NASA conspirator as disinformation. If the world doubts we ever landed on the moon no one is going to believe the kooks who start talking about the glass-like ruins of a massive intergalactic civilization that was discovered on the moon. Furthermore, such a belief would prevent othe contries from even trying to get to the moon to see the “stunning ruins and bits and pieces of a miraculous, preserved technology orbiting just a quarter of a million miles away.” Why is it that these conspirators with all the power and brilliance are always so stupid. Let me get this straight — the Chinese are not going to try to land a person on the moon (which is obviously physically possible given allot of Tang, a few disposable chimps and rocket fuel) because they think that we faked it?

So, yeah. I can believe that there was a conspiracy — perhaps even by Nazis and Occultists — to go the moon. Hell, I think I might already believe that the government is run by Nazis and Occultists. And I’m pretty sure they regularly conspire to do all sorts of mean stupid things. However, most of the time it’s to make themselves rich — not to uncover and then conceal alien astronauts . And I’d even admit to believing in a vast, ancient, alien civilization that once romped around the universe (perhaps they still do). But the ideas that there are giant alien artifacts on the moon is just silly.

Why would there be huge artifacts on the moon and not on earth. Hell, we are stupid primitive planet and we’ve managed to get our crap everywhere. And you know what …. I’m done thinking about this stupidity.

Sex and Rockets here.