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'Sex In Space' Author Defends Book
By Daniel Sorid
Staff Writer and
Frederic Castel, Special to SPACE.com
posted: 11:23 am ET
24 February 2000
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sex_urbanlegend_000224 It seems that one urban legend has become a cosmic myth. SPACE.com has found that allegations in a newly published book that claims NASA conducted sex experiments on a space shuttle mission in 1996 may have originated from an internet parody dating back to the 1980s. The book, The Final Mission, written by French astronomer Pierre Kohler, claims that scientists used elastic belts and inflatable tubes to test 10 sexual positions on a space shuttle mission in 1996. The allegations have spawned a media whirlwind, and drawn a categorical denial from NASA. But the source for the book may be a parody posted on an internet newsgroup as early as 1989, as well as on various humor sites on the World Wide Web. In an exclusive interview with SPACE.com, the author of the book acknowledges that the documents he used for information about the sex tests may indeed be fraudulent. "Of course it could be a hoax, but it's a remote possibility," Kohler said. "I have more reasons to believe that it's true." Kohler said he found the document on the internet, but verified the validity with a sexologist named Ray Noonan, who wrote his doctoral thesis on the subject of sexual issues in space. Noonan, in an interview, denied this. He also mentioned that his comments about sex tests were only a small part of his book. "My book speaks about all the aspects of life in space. Only one page of my book speaks about sex in space," he said. "I think it was worth mentioning this piece information, although I never reported it as a certitude or as an absolute truth." The internet posting mirrors the book in its details about the experiments, including the use of an elastic belt, the mission number and the NASA publication number. One website claims to have pulled the piece from a posting to the "alt.sex" newsgroup on November 28, 1989.The NASA mission mentioned in the piece, STS 75 -- which carried an all-male crew -- was launched in 1996, years after the parody surfaced. According to posts on the internet, this seems unlikely. One note on the newsgroup "sci.space.policy," by a person going by the name "Bruce Sterling Woodcock," remarks that the document backing the book's assertions is an urban legend that has lived on for years via e-mail forwards and Usenet groups. "Not this urban legend again," Woodcock writes. "This thing has been around for years."
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