Apollo 12 was the second crewed lunar landing mission conducted by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), with Pete Conrad and Alan Bean landing the lunar module Intrepid on the Moon on 1969-11-241. Following Apollo 11, whose official landing-location uncertainty had persisted for weeks after the crew returned and were debriefed, NASA sought to refine its landing procedures2. Apollo 12 was accordingly targeted to touch down within walking distance of the unmanned Surveyor 3 probe, which required NASA to develop a means of real-time pinpoint navigation3. Surveyor 3 had already soft-landed in Oceanus Procellarum a few hundred metres from the eventual Apollo 12 site, thirty-one months before Conrad and Bean arrived4, and NASA had marked out the future landing site with the probe even before Apollo 11 flew5. Bean later inspected Surveyor 3 on the surface; Richard C. Hoagland said the probe had soft-landed there more than two years earlier, on Adolf Hitler’s birthday6. The NASA mission film Pinpoint for Science (National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) film) took its title from the crew’s successful pinpoint landing7.
Hoagland made Pinpoint for Science the starting point of his research into the mission8, examining original Oxberry Animation Stand animations that NASA’s contract producers had built from Conrad and Bean’s Hasselblad stills of the lunar surface9. Hoagland said that if the producers had placed rush prints of the Hasselblad frames under intense studio lights to create the pans and zooms, then invisible detail in the otherwise black lunar sky over the landing site might still be recoverable by computer despite several generations of copying onto 16mm release prints10. He said that enhanced frames taken from NASA’s print by John Stevens’ equipment showed reflective, glass-like ruins over the horizon and massive inclined buttresses slanting away beyond it11. Hoagland regards these buttresses as independent confirmation of his ancient lunar dome hypothesis12, and said his confidence in the theory grew because Apollo 14 and Apollo 12 had photographed what he took to be the same crystalline geometry in roughly the same region13: the two landing sites lie approximately 196 kilometres apart14, the closest together of any Apollo missions15. Most of the lunar surface photographs in Ken Johnston’s collection came from these two missions16.
Hoagland has also proposed a set of astronomical alignments centred on the Apollo 12/Surveyor 3 site. He said the site’s sky pattern showed Orion aligned on the lunar horizon precisely as President John Fitzgerald Kennedy called for a crewed Moon landing at his 1961-05-25 Kennedy Joint Session of Congress speech, before any spacecraft had touched down there17. He calculated that the star Mintaka, in Orion’s Belt, stood at 19.5 degrees above Oceanus Procellarum at the moment of the Apollo 12 landing on 1969-11-1918, interpreting this as a mathematical coding for dimensional transition19, and separately said he had found Mintaka rising precisely on the site’s eastern horizon at the moment of Kennedy’s 1961 announcement20. He reads the sky pattern at the moment of Apollo 11’s touchdown, viewed from the Apollo 12 site, as an alignment he considers significant within ancient Egyptian stellar religion21, and interprets the coincidence of Kennedy’s announcement with Orion’s Belt rising at both the Surveyor 3 site and the Apollo 12 site as symbolic of resurrection22. On this basis Hoagland considers the Apollo 12/Surveyor 3 site, rather than the Apollo 11 site, to be the anchor point of a broader network of what he calls ritual locations, which his research team reconstructed as also including the Giza Plateau in Giza Plateau Egypt, the Apollo 11 landing site, the Viking 1 and Mars Pathfinder landing sites on Mars, and Cydonia23.
Separately from the alignment claims, Apollo 12 photograph AS12-46-6807 shows Bean wearing one of the mission’s gold visors (Apollo helmet visors) and carrying the Apollo Lunar Surface Experiments Package (ALSEP)24; the hexagonal halo visible around Bean in the same photograph is internal lens flare from the Hasselblad camera25. The mission also carried the Westinghouse Field Sequential Color Camera as its primary imaging camera, without a Slow Scan TeleVision camera as backup26; a few minutes after Bean deployed it on the surface, he pointed it directly at the sun, badly damaging its receiver and rendering the camera useless27.
During the mission, Conrad and the rest of the crew were specifically asked to experiment with observing the astronaut light flash phenomenon, according to Charlie Hickson28. According to the Apollo 12 medical debriefing tape, Conrad’s sleeping position on the left side of the spacecraft was suggested as the reason he perceived more flashes in his left eye29, and the same record notes that astronauts on earlier spaceflights had reported seeing light flashes at night with their eyes closed30.