It’s amazing how you can “miss” something so clear.
In the David Percy/Mary Bennett Dark Moon/What Happened on the Moon book / documentary, they include reference to a 1958 speech by future usurping president Lyndon B Johnson. The relevant parts are reproduced below in an article by Alan Wasser (a “mainstream” author).
Beware the “Masters of Infinity”: the Space Race is born
By the time the hearings finished six weeks later, on January 8, 1958, even the New York Times was using the “Space Race” phrase. Their headline that day read “Text of Johnson’s Statement on Status of Nation’s Defense and Race for Space”. The Washington Post that day headlined “Free World Must Control Space, Johnson tells Senate Group”.
In his subcommittee’s detailed summary statement Johnson proclaimed that our very future depended on being the ones who first seized ownership of space. “Control of space means control of the world,” Johnson declared.
From space, the masters of infinity would have the power to control the earth’s weather, to cause drought and flood, to change the tides and raise the levels of the sea, to divert the gulf stream and change temperate climates to frigid.
Johnson continued:
In essence, the Soviet Union has appraised control of space as a goal of such consequence that achievement of such control has been made a first aim of national policy. [In contrast], our decisions, more often than not, have been made within the framework of the Government’s annual budget. Against this view, we now have on record the appraisal of leaders in the field of science, respected men of unquestioned competence, whose valuation of what control of outer space means renders irrelevant the bookkeeping concerns of fiscal officers.
I wish I’d included this in my CCGW Exposed book! However, I did include this, from 3 years later:
- “We shall propose further cooperative efforts between all nations in weather prediction and eventually in weather control.”
