“I spent three days with the astronauts in Areas 7, 9, and 10 during astronaut training, several years before they went to the moon,” Williams recalls. In the 1960s, astronauts had rock-star status, and Williams remembered the event like it was yesterday. “The astronauts had coveralls and wore field packs, mock-ups of the real thing, strapped on their backs. They had cameras mounted on their hats and they took turns walking up and down the subsidence craters. It was steep, rocky terrain,” he explains. Williams originally worked for the Atomic Energy Commission in feeding and housing, making sure the “feed wagon” got to remote areas of the atomic bombing range. “We’d get mashed potatoes and gravy to the faraway places inside the test site,” Williams says, “hot food being a key to morale.” But the multitalented Williams quickly became the test site’s jack-of-all-trades, including astronaut guide. His other jobs included being in charge of the motor pool and helping CIA engineers drill for Area 51’s first water well. But for Williams, the highlight of his career was escorting the first men on the moon inside the atomic craters.
“I was with them in 1965, and again five years later when they came back,” Williams recalls. This time the astronauts arrived with a lunar roving vehicle to test what it might be like driving on the moon. The astronauts were taken out to the Schooner crater, located on the Pahute Mesa in Area 20. “We picked them up at the Pahute airstrip and took them and the vehicle into the crater where there was pretty rough terrain,” Williams explains. “Some boulders out there were ten feet tall. One of the astronauts said, ‘If we encounter this kind of thing on the moon, we’re not going to get very far.’” Williams recalls the astronauts learning how to fix a flat tire on the moon. “They took off a steel tire and put on a rubber one” out in the field.
The lunar roving vehicle was not a fast-moving vehicle, and the astronauts took turns driving it. “NASA had built it and had driven it in a lot of flat places,” Williams explains. “But before it came to the test site and drove on the craters, the vehicle had no real experience on inhospitable terrain. The astronauts also did a lot of walking out there,” Williams adds. One of the requirements of the Apollo astronauts who would be driving during moon missions was that they had to be able to walk back to the lunar module if the rover failed.
The craters Williams was talking about are subsidence craters—geologic by-products of underground bomb tests. When a nuclear bomb is placed in a deep vertical shaft, as hundreds were at the test site (not to be confused with tunnel tests), the explosion vaporizes the surrounding earth and liquefies the rock. Once that molten rock cools, it solidifies at the bottom of the cavity, and the earth above it collapses, creating the crater. The glass-coated rock, giant boulders, and loose rubble that remain resemble the craters found on the moon. So similar in geology were the atomic craters to moon craters that in voice transcripts sent back during the Apollo 16 and Apollo 17 missions, astronauts twice referred to the craters at the Nevada Test Site. During Apollo 16, John W. Young got specific. A quarter of a million miles away from Earth, while marveling at a lunar crater laden with rocks, Young asked fellow astronaut Charles M. Duke Jr., “Remember how it was up at that crater? At Schooner.” He was referring to the atomic crater Ernie Williams took the astronauts to in Area 20. During Apollo 17, while looking at the Haemus Mountains, Harrison H. Schmitt can be heard talking about the Buckboard Mesa craters in Area 19. For Ernie Williams, hearing this comparison was a beautiful moment. For lunar-landing conspiracy theorists, of which there are millions worldwide, the feeling was one of suspicion. For these naysayers, Schmitt’s telemetry tapes, the moon photographs, the moon rocks—everything having to do with the Apollo moon missions would become grist for a number of ever-growing conspiracies that have been tied to man’s journey to the moon.
Just two months after Armstrong and Aldrin returned home, a UFO-on-the-moon conspiracy was born. On September 29, 1969, in New York City, the newest installment of National Bulletin magazine rolled off the printing press with a shocking headline: “Phony Transmission Failure Hides Apollo 11 Discovery. Moon Is a UFO Base,” it read. The author of the article, Sam Pepper, said he’d been leaked a transcript of what NASA had allegedly edited out of the live broadcast back from the moon, namely, that there were UFOs there. Various UFO groups pressed their congressmen to take action, several of whom wrote to NASA requesting a response. “The incident… did not take place,” NASA’s assistant administrator for legal affairs shot back in a memo from January 1970.