So is it petrified wood from the Moon, or petrified wood from the USA? Apollo Hoax- FOR REAL!

'Moon rock' in Dutch museum is just petrified wood

AP

It's not green cheese, but it might as well be.

The Dutch national museum said Thursday 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 will keep it anyway as a curiosity.

"It's a good story, with some questions that are still unanswered," she said. "We can laugh about it."

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 exact details.

"I do remember that (Drees) was very interested in the little piece of stone," the NOS quoted Middendorf as saying. "But that it's not real, I don't know anything about that."

He could not immediately be reached for comment Thursday.

The U.S. Embassy in the Hague said it was investigating the matter.

The museum had vetted the moon rock with a phone call to NASA, Van Gelder said.

She said the space agency told the museum then that it was possible the Netherlands had received a rock: NASA gave moon rocks to more than 100 countries in the early 1970s, but those were from later missions.

"Apparently no one thought to doubt it, since it came from the prime minister's collection," Van Gelder said.

The rock is not usually on display; the museum is primarily known for its paintings and other works of fine art by masters such as Rembrandt.

A jagged fist-size stone with reddish tints, it was mounted and placed above a plaque that said, "With the compliments of the Ambassador of the United States of America ... to commemorate the visit to The Netherlands of the Apollo-11 astronauts." The plaque does not specify that the rock came from the moon's surface

It was given at the opening of an exhibition on space exploration.

It was on show in 2006 and a space expert informed the museum it was unlikely NASA would have given away any moon rocks three months after Apollo returned to Earth.

Researchers from Amsterdam's Free University said they could see at a glance 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.

He said the rock, which the museum at one point insured for more than half a million dollars, was worth no more than euro50 ($70).

Van Gelder said one important unanswered question is why Drees was given the stone. He was 83 years old in 1969 and had been out of office for 11 years. On the other hand, he was the country's elder statesman, the prime minister who helped the Netherlands rebuild after World War II.

Middendorf was treasurer of the Republic National Committee from 1965 until 1969, when President Richard Nixon dispatched him to the Netherlands.

Permalink: PIMPINTURTLE.COM/2009/08/28/moon-rock-in-dutch-museum-is-just-petrified-wood.aspx

Alan Moore for grownups (not suitable for children or half-educated comics fans)

Leftist and Marxist critics of culture understand historical amnesia, subject to the logic of '80s capitalism, to be the condition of postmodernity. Fredric Jameson diagnoses postmodern culture as an expression of the logic of late capitalism ("Postmodernism and Consumer Society" 125). While culture within postmodernity tends to reinforce this historical amnesia, Jameson leaves open the question of whether art can resist the logic of capitalism. Moore's work is an explicit condemnation of the amnesia of consumer society, most striking because it is exercised within a cultural form notorious for its ideological co-operation with conservative, capitalist logic, namely the mainstream comic book itself. The exploration of the possibility of an honest utopia in Marvelman serves as an explicit challenge to the historical amnesia dominating the West, due simply to the oddity of such a narrative turn within the general cynicism of the postmodern moment. More recently, Jameson points out that to have an historical sense, to be able to imagine change and progress, the arrival of the new, implies a sense of the utopian, if not necessarily a concrete vision of utopia ("The Politics of Utopia" 36). As Moore suggests in his work, the loss of a sense of the utopian, of the imaginative, and of the historical, consequently threatens the dissolution of the existence of humanity altogether. Moore's critical gaze in the 1980s was focussed on the economic, social and political context of Western society, and also on the formal context of the comic book industry. If, on the one hand, he uses his work to re-enchant social reality with historical meaning and hopeful progressivism, he also sees himself as re-enchanting the formal universe of comic books with a liberating, imaginative spirit, trying to keep Pictopia alive, while imagining the possibilities for utopian thinking as well. Ironically, while Moore has had an enormous influence on the comic book industry, it has been largely as fuel for the bulldozers mowing away Pictopia, for the perpetuation of historical amnesia. This is due to the negative effect of his most famous, frequently read work, Watchmen (1986-87), drawn by Dave Gibbons, a revisionist superhero narrative which, due to its incredible success, influenced the cynical turn in late '80s and early '90s comics, but in a manner Moore himself did not intend. Watchmen, an unsurpassed revisionist superhero narrative, was a further progression in Moore's historiographic vision, but it was received by the comics industry as an invitation to abandon the past and transform superheroes into violent, amoral killers as a means of making comics more "realistic" and appealing to new readers.

Source: here.