Here's something that ought to pump some life blood into moon-landing-conspiracy theorists everywhere.
If you visited the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam over the last 17 years and thought you saw a genuine moon rock, get ready to be disappointed. Not only didn't the rock you saw come from the moon, it wasn't even a rock.
Recent tests by the museum confirm that what you saw was actually just a piece of petrified wood probably from right here in Arizona.
Is there finally some definitive proof that the moon landing was actually staged in the desert here on earth? Not so fast... The blunder is more than likely the result of a communication breakdown than a decades-old governmental conspiracy.
The "moon rock" was donated to the museum 17 years ago by the late Prime Minister Willem Drees.
Drees got the rock from the U.S. Ambassador to the Netherlands back in 1969, when he had been out of office for nearly a decade and was almost completely deaf and blind.
"My guess is that he did not hear well what was said," his grandson tells the Associated Press. "He may have formed his own idea about what it was."
If that's the case and U.S. Ambassadors are just handing out pieces of petrified wood from Arizona as gifts, we have some work to do on our diplomacy.
When Drees donated the "rock," officials at the museum called NASA to confirm that it was a moon rock. Without even looking at it, NASA assured the museum that it could be a moon rock, and the museum just kinda rolled with it.
Why wouldn't it? For some reason the idea of an exhibit of petrified wood from 3,500 miles away doesn't exactly have the same draw as a rock from the depths of space.
