The Dutch national museum said yesterday that one of its prized possessions, a rock supposedly brought back from the moon by U.S. astronauts, is just a piece of petrified wood.
Rijksmuseum spokeswoman Xandra van Gelder, who oversaw the investigation that proved the piece was a fake, said the museum would keep it anyway as a curiosity...
The museum acquired the rock after the death of former Prime Minister Willem Drees in 1988. Drees received it as a private gift on Oct. 9, 1969 from then-U.S. Ambassador J. William Middendorf during a visit by the three Apollo 11 astronauts, part of their "Giant Leap" goodwill tour after the first moon landing.
Middendorf, who lives in Rhode Island, told Dutch broadcaster NOS news that he had gotten it from the U.S. State Department, but couldn't recall the details...
Researchers from Amsterdam's Free University said they could see at a glance that the rock was probably not from the moon. They followed the initial appraisal up with extensive testing.
"It's a nondescript, pretty-much-worthless stone," geologist Frank Beunk concluded in an article published by the museum.
What a hoax!
ReplyDeleteIt is so obviously a Silicate, which is impossible to have formed on the Moon. It's fracture and it's lustre, and it looks like it has terrestrial dirt in it. And red? Moonrocks are Basalt - and gray to black. Helen Keller could have seen this was not a Moonrock. What in insult, and what MORONS to not see the bleeding obvious for forty years. Unbelievable. The only way this was a Moonrock is if Middendorf had pulled it out of his ass, which in a way, he did.
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