Here at the Free Thought Project, we've seen some outright insanity when it comes to the actions of government and the police state. However, a grandma being raided by a NASA police force so they can steal her dead husband's moon rock, is definitely up there.
When Joann Davis was 75, she hit some hard financial times after finding herself raising grandchildren following her daughter's death and her son's illness. So, being the resourceful grandmother that she is, Davis began to think of ways to earn some extra cash.
Then it hit her.
Her first husband, Robert Davis worked as an Apollo 11 engineer, and he saved a paperweight with moon material and another with a bit of the heat shield. Joann, who also worked for the space program at the time, came up with the idea that she'd ask NASA if they'd like to buy it from her, so she could raise some funds to feed her grandchildren.
Brilliant, right?
Well, to most people with common sense, this is a great idea. However, to the American police state, it's a felony. Now, Davis is attempting to sue officials for the brutal and humiliating treatment she endured at the hands of NASA agents.
The lead agent
"organized a sting operation involving six armed officers to forcibly seize a Lucite paperweight containing a moon rock the size of a rice grain from an elderly grandmother," wrote Judge Sidney Thomas of the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals in the recent decision allowing Davis to sue, per the
Los Angeles Times.Instead of telling Davis that it is against the law to sell moon rocks (yeah, we didn't know that either), NASA set up an elaborate sting operation to nail this grandma — turned would be international moon rock fence — to the wall.
While Davis became excited to think that she'd finally get some financial padding by selling this moon rock, armed NASA agents were plotting away to take her down.
The sting would take place at a local Denny's restaurant. These brave cops must've obviously known they were dealing with a hardened criminal when she asked to meet them at Denny's.
The armed NASA agents then raided the Denny's and forcibly restrained the
dangerous 75-year-old grandma and her second husband who was along for the trade.
As they heroically protected society from the likes of a poor grandmother trying to support her dead child's children, officers refused to allows Davis to use the bathroom. They forced her to defecate in her pants. Heroic indeed.
As
Mercury News reports, Davis stood in the parking lot of a Denny's restaurant in pants soaked in urine, answering questions from a federal agent about a rice-sized piece of moon.
"He kept saying, 'You will be going to federal court, you will be going to federal jail,' " Davis said Friday.
"In the end, Ms. Davis spent her whole life proudly working for aerospace and the government, only to be jumped by a NASA-organized swat team because someone in NASA made a mistake and wanted to get it back," said Davis' Redlands-based lawyer, Peter Schlueter.
"And they did it in a way that humiliated her."As authorities made the case against the moon rock-dealing elderly woman, they likely garnered the attention of prosecutors on the way through the system. Eventually, those prosecutors would drop the case against Davis. However, not before she'd be arrested and brutally humiliated by NASA agents.
In this week's ruling, according to
Newser, the judges said Davis made a case that the detention violated her constitutional right regarding unreasonable seizure. She is suing agent Norman Conley, who
"had no law enforcement interest in detaining Davis for two hours while she stood wearing urine-soaked pants in a restaurant's parking lot during the lunch rush," wrote Thomas.
In what world would it be considered in the interest of public safety to organize a sting operation, carried out by a team of armed agents, to kidnap and cage a woman for selling her dead husband's moon rock to feed her grandchildren? Well, apparently, this world.
As
Mercury News reports, Davis' son died seven months after the incident. If Davis, who will be 80 next month, is successful in her suit, she says she would like to build a picnic area at Whitefish Lake in Montana as a memorial to both her son and her daughter.
Reader Comments
Is a grain sized piece of moon rock (allegedly) really worth this much trouble?
Also, has anyone heard of the term entrapment?
I would say that this poor woman, if she really exists as described, definitely has a case.
Too bad she is fighting one of the most corrupt government agencies on the planet.
What is known for sure is that even some of the ‘debunking’ websites have, albeit reluctantly, acknowledged that meteorite samples gathered from Antarctica are virtually indistinguishable from NASA’s collection of Moon rocks. Of course, as we very recently learned, that is not true of all of NASA’s Moon rocks. Some of them apparently bear no resemblance at all to lunar meteorites. Instead, they look an awful lot like petrified wood from the Arizona desert. Such was the case with a ‘Moon rock’ that the Dutch national museum has been carefully safeguarding for many years now, before discovering, in August of 2009, that they were in reality the proud owners of the most over-insured piece of petrified wood on the planet. The ‘Moon rock’ had been a gift to the Dutch from the U.S. State Department, and its authenticity had reportedly been verified through a phone call to NASA.
I’m guessing that NASA was probably running low on meteorite fragments and figured the Dutch wouldn’t know the difference anyway. Or maybe Washington was a little peeved over the fact that Dutch newspapers reportedly called NASA’s bluff at the time of the first alleged Moon landing. This is not to suggest, of course, that all of the Moon rocks passed out by NASA and the State Department are obvious fakes. Most, presumably, are of lunar origin – but that doesn’t necessarily mean they were gathered by American astronauts walking on the surface of the Moon; they could just as easily have come to Earth as meteorites. It is also possible that they are of otherworldly origin but not from the Moon at all – such as meteorites from other sources that have been collected here on Earth.
The only way to know for sure what NASA’s Moon rocks are, of course, would be to compare them to a ‘control rock’ that is known to be from the Moon. The problem, alas, is that the only known source for ‘authenticated’ Moon rocks is NASA, the very same folks who are known to occasionally hand out chunks of petrified wood. The other problem, it turns out, is that most of the Moon rocks are, uhmm, missing. Does anyone see a pattern developing here?
Since the discovery of the fake Moon rock in the Dutch museum, ‘debunkers’ have claimed that the fact that no other Moon rocks have been declared fake proves that the Dutch case is an isolated one. “After that announcement,” goes the argument, “wouldn’t every other country in possession of a Moon rock have rushed to have them authenticated? And since no other country has made a similar announcement, doesn’t that prove that the Moon rocks are real?” At first glance, that would appear to be a valid argument. The problem, however, is that the vast majority of those countries can’t test their ‘Moon rocks’ because, shockingly enough, no one knows where they are! As the Associated Press reported on September 13, 2009, “Nearly 270 rocks scooped up by U.S. astronauts were given to foreign countries by the Nixon administration … Of 135 rocks from the Apollo 17 mission given away to nations or their leaders, only about 25 have been located by CollectSpace.com, a website for space history buffs that has long attempted to compile a list … The outlook for tracking the estimated 134 Apollo 11 rocks is even bleaker. The locations of fewer than a dozen are known.”It appears then that having a ‘control rock’ wouldn’t really be of much help after all, since nearly 90% of the alleged Moon rocks that we would want to test don’t seem to be around any more.