Sounds like a bad fan-fiction.
Yes, emphasis on
bad. His other stories are in the ghost-visitation genre -- historical fiction. Sticking to that would have been a good idea. Here, however, he's muddied the genre with cloak-and-dagger.
I see from his posting history here that he has
zero track record of producing evidence when asked, so I don't expect him to be forthcoming with the name of the golf-course employee who helped him. Of course I can call them up -- their number is public. But as today is a U.S. holiday popular with golfers, and as of this writing they will have just opened for the morning, I won't call them today. But I fully expect them to say they haven't the faintest idea what this author is talking about. And then I predict he'll either run away, or have some predictably lame excuse, such as protecting this or that, or maintaining the party line.
Nothing wrong with the historical fiction genre, as long as you put down that it's fiction. There's a paragraph prefacing James Michener's
Space that explains what he intends to be fictional and what he intends to be factual. However, this poor author has claimed it to be fact, which is the worst thing you can do if you're a historical fiction writer. There are enough people who care about the integrity of the historical record that they don't want your ten-quid fantasy mucking it all up.
But then when you go and pollute one genre with an incompatible one, you're just asking for it. The "ghost of Neil Armstrong" bit is clearly fantastical and clearly plays into the kind of fiction this author likes to write. But that alone could have worked. People would know it was meant as fiction. But when you combine it with allegations of fact such as a golf tournament and hoaxed missions, you've got one foot on the boat and the other still on the dock. Not a very tenuous position.
The golf-tournament claim is patently absurd. No one trying to perpetrate a multi-billion-dollar hoax is going to do something so obviously unwise as to appear conspicuously in public and leave paper records of it. My guess is this author has cooked up a claim that seems just plausible enough to convince a few people to part with a few quid over it. But he sure won't help us verify it. And he knows none of his readers will.
If he's gonna stick to the claim that it's a true story, then the ghost-of-Armstrong bit goes right out. You can't prove claims of fact by appealing to the supernatural.
But if the claim is that the Moon landings were faked, then that has a body of evidence associated with it that has nothing to do with whether Armstrong was playing golf in Hawaii on some given day. That's a claim that can be defended without referring to Armstrong at all.
In another thread he bragged about having a couple thousand hits to his site. (At least we know he's clocking hits as a result of his shilling.) My site gets many tens of thousands of hits per month. I can work a few SEO and keyword magic tricks to make sure my site comes up on a search for his books. Imagine what his sales will look like when someone can click on my review and read that I contacted the golf course in question and discovered that they don't know what he's talking about. Imagine when that likely outcome becomes a sentence in the Amazon reviews I publish.
So the evidence had better be forthcoming, and quickly. I note that he's under moderation, which means he has only a very few posts to convince us here he's not a shill or a troll.
