NASA Involved Amateur Astronomers to Complete Its Apollo 12 "Hollow Moon" Test

On November 20, 1969, David Blackshear, an amateur astronomer, went to the Fernbank Planetarium in Decatur, Georgia, (U.S.A.) for a night of special stargazing to see the Apollo 12 mission and found himself to be critical to the actual mission, which he was simply planning to watch through a telescope !

In summary, the Apollo 12 “Hollow Moon” test was compromised, and Blackshear and his amateur Astronomy colleagues got temporarily recruited by NASA to solve a telemetry crisis. The quick thinking of the stargazers working together with pen and paper from the ground saved the mission! This is the transcript of Blackshear’s testimony about that event, as he recalled it, on two audio recordings submitted to Sites of Sound on September 10, 2025:

Audio Testimony 1:

“Well, here’s the rest of the story that was not reported by the press. It only had a small blurb in some obscure astronomy magazine. We went out to Fernbank Science Center with an intensified night vision camera manufactured by Impossible Electronic Techniques, and we hooked it up to the 36” telescope at the observatory. And we were looking for the Intrepid, which was the ascent stage of the Apollo 12 rocket that was scheduled for impact-seismic readings on the moon. They had NASA in Houston, NASA Space Center in Houston had lost telemetry with the Intrepid and, therefore, were not able to finish complete the mission of recording the impact of the seismic results; and we acquired visually, through the telescope, the S4V and also noticed that we were seeing 16th magnitude stars, which was even way below the threshold of the naked eye through the telescope. But we saw a Russian spy satellite also. There weren’t many satellites up in those days. It was not supposed to be known, but there it was. And we reacquired the mission visually. We had a little 9” close-circuit TV monitor hooked up to the camera, which, in turn, was hooked up to the 36” Tinsley telescope, and we visually saw the little bright dot in the sky and reacquired it by putting (finding) the coordinates on the little 9” monitor with a laying-eye grid of latitude and longitude so that we could find (locate) it and re-establish telemetry, and that’s what happened; and it was able to complete the mission and save the country millions of dollars that would have been lost. And I suspect that probably the reason it wasn’t reported is because NASA was embarrassed because, of all their high-tech equipment, they could not relocate something as easily as we did with just with the camera and a test telescope. So that’s the rest of the story.”

Audio Testimony 2:

“Correction, it was impact-seismic recordings that were scheduled for both the lunar module, as it was - ascent module as it was sent back, crashing to the lunar surface - as well as the Intrepid, which was part of the Saturn 5 rocket booster.”

WATCH the History Channel video about the event: https://youtu.be/L72s_23V-HQ?si=e67dQZc7hfts0jUc