The Tale of the Blue Light

with real-world experience across a range of industries, Deloitte helps recognize how a breakthrough in aerospace might ripple into healthcare. How an innovation in agriculture could trickle into retail or biotech, or even manufacturing. Is it clear, violence? Hardly. It's what happens when experienced multi-disciplinary teams and innovative tech come together to offer clients bold new approaches to address their unique challenges, helping them confidently navigate what's next. Deloitte, together makes progress. Moonrise is sponsored by Hunters on Amazon Prime Video. Inspired by true events, Hunters stars Al Pacino as the leader of a Ragtag pack of Nazi Hunters. Watch February 21 on Amazon Prime Video. Did you feel more sort of like an end or a beginning? I think it was both. I think that the fact that we landed successfully was the end of the attempt, but the beginning of the adventure of let's go to the moon over and over again. We proved we could do it. I was up in Boston on the campus of MIT, doing some research and interviews about the old Apollo missions. And one of my conversations was with one of the country's earliest astronauts, Charlie Duke. He went to the moon on Apollo 16. When you look up at the sky at night and you see the moon, what do you see? What do you think about? A lot of memories flood, especially when I look at a half moon because that's the moon we had when we landed. We were back on the campus that launched his astronautics career more than 60 years ago. And he started telling me this strange dream he had of being on the moon. He doesn't ever really talk about it. He hadn't even told his wife at the time. I was on the moon with John and we were driving and we came across the ridge going north. And there was a set of tracks on the moon. A set of tracks, tire tracks. Just imagine how haunting this is. They touched down near the moon's Descartes crater, a spot where as far as NASA knew, no humans had ever landed before. And suddenly, they noticed what are definitely another vehicle's tracks running across the gray, cratered landscape. And we asked Mission Control, could we follow the tracks? They said, yeah, you got really excited. You have to follow the tracks. So they did? Yeah. So we turned right and went about a mile or two across the moon. They were in their spacesuits driving along in their rover and following these tracks across the moon's mountain peaks and then down into valleys and up again, down again. Came across this ridge and there was this vehicle. It looked like the rover right there. There were two guys in it. So we jumped out and say, hey, there's a vehicle up here. It was just so eerie to see this thing he'd been tracking. Just stopped now in the middle of nowhere. And I ran around and to the right side of this other vehicle. And he stepped closer, weightless, breathless. And he lifted his gloved fingers to the guy's tainted face plate. And I raised the visor of this person. And it was me. It'll take time for the full meaning of his story to unfurl, reveal itself. Come along with me. By the end of the series, you'll understand this beginning. I'm Lily and Cunningham with the Washington Post. And this is Moonrise. We choose to go to the moon in this decay and do the other thing, not because they are easy, but because they are hard. [MUSIC PLAYING] [INAUDIBLE] Nova City Space Station calling Captain Star, report for a special space station. And now for today's drilling a vector in space with Captain Star, the Comboean return. [MUSIC PLAYING] [PHONE RINGING] Hey, this is Cleveland, some of the Washington Post. I work at a place that catalogs time and space. We record the stories of what's happened on this planet-- humanity's progress, elections, scientific discoveries. But also, it's setbacks-- natural disasters, power struggles, war. My current reporting assignment has me investigating an event that fuses both the best and worst of this human experience. The real story behind why we first propelled ourselves off this planet to the moon. 50 years after the Apollo 11 landing made the front page of the Washington Post in July of 1969, the narrative has been cemented in the collective American memory and psyche. The standard tale always starts with Sputnik, the first satellite the Soviet Union sent into space in the late 1950s. Then a few years later, after the Soviets sent the first man briefly into space, Yuri Gagarin, America finally got serious. And President Kennedy issued his famous call to arms in 1961. I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal before this decade is out of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth. After eight years of a Cold War space race, it finishes in 1969 with the ultimate triumph. It's one small step for man. An American touching down first on the lunar surface and planting a red, white, and blue flag. It's a perfect story, the moonshot. It starts with a visionary president engaging the country in a noble pursuit against an adversary. And it ends with a demonstration of, yes, political might, but also the capacity of the human spirit. That's the story we learn, anyway. But in the 50 years that have passed since the moon landing, presidential documents have been declassified. Once secret programs have been revealed. So when you ask space historians today, why did we go to the moon? You get very different and interesting answers. Starting with the fact that while it might have been Kennedy's decision to go to the moon, it definitely wasn't Kennedy's idea. They began tracing the story backwards. So if it wasn't really JFK's idea, who's was it? This became my journey, a reporting trip back in time through the tangled web of Cold War presidents and political rain makers. You and Kushev might be able to come closer together on list than many other maps. Soviet rocket scientists. German missile engineers. It lay himself. It felt that this would be impossible. And also American science fiction writers. Hello. You've caught me typing, but that's no surprise. I'm typing all the time. All of these people form the real origin story behind Kennedy's iconic decision to send humans to the moon. A decision, it turns out, that JFK secretly regretted he made. So if not with Sputnik or Kennedy, where does the story really start? Beginnings can manipulate. If we begin our Moontail with a Soviet challenge and end with an American flag, we get one type of hero story. But if we start elsewhere, the story shifts, becomes more complex, truer, but also darker, more human, more profound. Like what if we start the story here? The news of Europe has it occurred. This is Earth in the year 1933. The first world war had ended bringing a temporary piece to the planet. Soon enough, a second world war would break out again. But for now, there was a tentative truce, a pause, a shell shock from the earlier planetary destruction. And there was a quiet building up of new technological and chemical powers. It's against this backdrop that we need a young man who was about to become very important. He was 23 years old, and he had gone to MIT and Duke for physics. But now he was going to do what he didn't know. He walked out onto his porch in Durham, North Carolina to look at the rain. Back then, Durham was a town of mills and tobacco farms, sagging like the rest of America under the weight of the Great Depression. He watched the thunderstorm pummel the field of crops directly across the dirt road from him. Suddenly, when his eyes re-adjusted, he saw a glowing orb hovering before him. It was about the size of a basketball, but it was blue and buzzing and electric. Otherworldly. Was it in his mind? No, it was right there floating in front of him. He knew it was real. Could he control it? Could it somehow control him? His eyes were fixed on this orb. Then it moved across the field. It bounced off the crops. It bounced off a dilapidated barn. And it swerved toward a giant oak tree. The tree shattered into pieces. No flames, no smoke, just an instant pile of wood. What was that blue light? He wondered. He would go on to ask his former MIT professors, but they had no answer. Fantasy, they told him your imagination. But he knew it wasn't. Some power was out there, unnamed, and undiscovered. He was looking out at a world more wondrous than anyone could yet explain. But it all had an explanation. It could be known and explored and used to some end. He was sure of it. And that blue light had unlocked some drive within him to understand all the strange ways of the universe and what the future would hold if humanity could harness them. It unlocked, in a way, science fiction. In time, this man, John Campbell, would write who goes there, a classic story that served as the basis for the movie The Thing, which became a template for exploring the idea of other and self good and evil for generations of sci-fi writers to come. More importantly, he became the editor of astounding, the magazine that birthed the golden age of science fiction in America. His visions, his questions, his publications, and his new breed of scientifically curious writers would ultimately play a crucial role in getting us to the moon. That was all on the horizon. But maybe he could somehow feel it. Let's rise above Durham, where we see a world that would soon be on fire. Where death would come from the sky in the form of warheads and atomic bombs, a time when humans would race for the ability to annihilate the planet. Here is the present room in the city. The world will know that the first atomic bomb was dropped on E.O. Shiva, a military base. How would that nuclear death race turn into a race to explore the cosmos? How would something brilliant and good and profound emerge from the very worst of what we can be? Power, Hungary, petty, violent? And how would a science fiction editor have anything to do with one of the most ambitious human endeavors of all time? Join me. We'll find out. [MUSIC PLAYING] There is the Earth in Eden of the Galaxy in flames. But there also is the moon glimmering in the dark beyond, calling us upward like the tide. [MUSIC PLAYING] On the next episode of Moonrise, we start our journey through the moon story, a group of science fiction writers changing the American imagination, a cast of politicians wanting to beat more than just the Soviets, and a global network of scientists willing to do some very bad things for the ultimate goal of seducing us to the moon. [MUSIC PLAYING] Moonrise is a Washington Post audio podcast. It's the result of many incredible colleagues here, including producer Bishop Sand, editor Dennis Funk, project coordinator, Alison Michaels, art designer Courtney Khan, and director of audio, Gestal. We're so excited to launch this new series. If you're excited about it, too, please tell your friends, write a review on Apple. And of course, sign up to get the rest of the episodes as soon as they come out. New episodes will come out weekly, starting July 30. You can subscribe to Moonrise on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, really wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also find it on the Washington Post site at washingtonpost.com/Moonrise. A key source of historical detail about John Campbell was the book "A Stounding" by Alec Nevillelli. And the astronaut you heard me interview was retired US Air Force officer Charlie Duke. Archival clips in this episode are "Criticy of the Kennedy Archives, the KU Gun Center for the Study of Science Fiction, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's collection, and the LBJ Library." Finally, a special thank you to the Adler Planetarium for hosting our launch event. I'm Lillian Cunningham, the creator and host. Thanks for listening. Be back soon. [MUSIC PLAYING] And now here is your guide to these adventures of the mind of John Campbell Jr. For many years, a lot of us have been interested in considering the possibilities of meeting other life forms, other intelligent beings from other stars. Now, if there is life out there, some form of life, and remember, it may be beyond our most far-fetched imaginations. If there is life, we have our own earthships going out. In constant, regular deep space exploration, someday, somewhere. Maybe, hopefully, gas power might have taken us sometime. [MUSIC PLAYING] With real-world experience across a range of industries, Deloitte helps recognize how a breakthrough in aerospace might ripple into health care. Is it clear violence? Hardly. It's what happens when experienced multidisciplinary teams and innovative tech come together to offer clients bold new approaches to address their unique challenges, helping them confidently navigate what's next. When it comes to the big questions, who you ask matters. From breaking news to politics that impact your life, to advice you can trust, get answers you don't have to question with Ask the Post AI, trained exclusively on post-journalism with clear sourcing. And if we don't know the answer, we'll tell you. Ask the Post AI. Find it on WashingtonPost.com or in the app.