Letter from Thomas Gold to Dr Gordon MacDonald, Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics, University of California, California Says that 'I am keen to have people understand what I said and not what newspapers or other uninformed sources said I said. Since it is now pretty clear that the maria are covered by a flat layer of a deposit of soft 'soil' and not by a frozen lava, I would of course prefer if the propaganda did not continue to say that I was wrong. I really cannot think of a Surveyor result that could have been more like what I thought and wrote in the past. I only pointed out that there was a risk of such deposits being very soft (and there still is!) but that mostly vacuum welding will have made it a crunchy and not a flowing substance'. 10 June 1966