Sooner than many people expected, the first images taken by NASA’s Lunar Reconaissance Orbiter have been released – and they’re pretty stunning… click on these pics to bring up full size versions, as usual…
The images are of an area of the Moon close to Mare Nubium, and amazingly, they have a resolution 0f 3m. Three metres!! Ok, so that’s not as good as MRO’s HiRISE camera is capable of but it’s still pretty stunning, and the thing is, these are nowhere near the highest resolution images we’re going to get from LRO. The real goodies and treats will come when everything’s checked out and working properly, then we can expect to see, and drool over, images with a resolution of just half a metre…
Half a metre. Oh, wow…
Why is that such a big deal? After all, it’s The Moon, so even at that resolution all you’re going to see are smaller and smaller craters, and big boulders, in grainy close-up, right?
Wrong. If LRO can see things half a metre across on the surface of the Moon, then it will almost certainly be able to see “things” left behind by the Apollo astronauts. By “things” I don’t mean flags and footprints, but definitely the lunar rovers, the tracks made in the lunar dust by the rovers – and, most importantly perhaps, the boxy, 4-legged descent stages of the lunar modules that landed those astronauts on the Moon all those years ago.
Is there really anyone out there who would bet against July 20th – the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing - being a massive day for NASA, which will see them releasing, with great fanfare, an LRO image showing Tranquility Base, with the Eagle’s descent stage clearly visible? Not me! Not when the picture might show something like this…
That fascinating picture is the work of one of my image mage friends on unmannedspaceflight.com, AndyG. Andy (who gave me permission to use the image here, thanks Andy! ) very cleverly simulated LRO’s view of the Apollo 15 landing site by taking a frame from the 16mm camera’s footage of the Apollo 15 ascent module and giving it the same resolution as LRO’s camera, approx 15cm per pixel. Even at that resolution you can clearly see the boxy descent stage, its four legs, and dark trails on the surface where the light lunar dust was disturbed by the astronauts. How stunning is that?!? If LRO returns an image like that of Tranquility Base I might actually shed a tear… 
Inevitably, LRO’s capabilities mean many people are excited about this mission because they believe it will be a knockout blow to the “Apollo Hoax Believer” brigade, you know, the people who insist that NASA faked the Moon landings. Forums and bulletin and message boards are full of posts from Apollo supporters telling Hoax Believers (or “HB”s for short) that their time has come to an end, that NASA is about to prove, once and for all, that they did in fact send people to the Moon, and didn’t just mock the whole thing up on a sound stage deep in the American desert, like the one shown in the classic conspiracy movie CAPRICORN ONE, where NASA faked a post-Apollo manned Mars landing…
Dream on.
The HBs are never, repeat, NEVER going to be convinced that NASA went to the Moon. It doesn’t matter how many times they read, or you explain, that there were no stars in the Moon’s sky because the photos were exposed for the bright surface and foreground, so obviously teeny tiny faint starse wouldn’t be picked up by the camera. You can tell them a million times that the flags left by the astronauts aren’t “blowing in the breeze”, they’re actually flapping about because they’ve got supporting wire frames to stop them hanging there all limp and embarrassing for the photographs. They slap their hands over their ears and sing out “lalalalalala!” when you try to explain that the shadows cast by objects on the Moon look different to shadows cast by objects here on Earth because LIGHTING CONDITIONS ON THE MOON ARE NOTHING LIKE THEY ARE HERE ON EARTH!!
No. Sitting there, in their bedroom or basement, surrounded by old pizza boxes, posters of Gillian Anderson and Xena and piles of musty smelling X-Files t-shirts, HBs’ minds are totally and completely closed, so closed, in fact, that if you picked them up, flew them to the Moon and actually dropped them onto Eagle’s dusty descent stage they’d STILL insist it was just a prop, left there by an unmanned probe, and wasn’t proof that Armstrong and the others walked on the Moon..!
So trust me, when – not if, but when – NASA releases its first image of an Apollo landing site, the HBs aren’t going to be swayed an inch. They’ll dismiss them as Photoshop jobs, or insist that they aren’t detailed enough to show anything, that the feature labelled “LEM descent stage” is actually some rocks in a vaguly LM-like pattern. They’ll ask “Why, if we can see a small rover on Mars, can’t we see a huge lunar module on the Moon?” and when you patiently explain to them that MRO’s HiRISE camera is simply better than LRO’s camera, and that comparing the two probes is grossly unfair, they’ll just smile their knowing Muldur smiles and say, in that smug, self-satisfied tone they have, ”Ah ha…”, leaving you wanting to follow Buzz Aldrin’s example and sock them one.
But I’ve always though that’s the one fundamental flaw in their argument. If NASA faked it, they didn’t just fake “it”, thay had to fake it SIX TIMES! There were six succesful Moon landings, so that means they had to fake six landings, six sets of EVAs, six of everything.
Think about that.
How expensive would that have been? How complicated would that have been? How difficult would that have been?
We’ll come back to that later. In the meantime, let’s go back to basics for a moment and, taking a bright blue Stoopid pill, imagine NASA actually did fake the first Moon landing. What would that have required?
Well, it would have required that hundreds if not thousands – if not TENS of thousands – of people would have had to have been in on the secret, and have kept that secret, faithfully, to this very day. For even a single faked landing to have worked, everyone in the Astronaut Office, everyone at NASA HQ, everyone in Mission Control, every one of the astronauts themselves, would have had to be in on it and kept silence ever since.
( But they didn’t do it just the once, remember, they did it six times! More on that later… )
Come on.
Still not convinced? Sigh. Ok, then think of this. If the landings were faked, then they would have had to have been faked somewhere – our mysterious “sound stage” inside a mysterious “hangar” – so, everyone working there had to have been in on the secret. That’s every technician and engineer, every computer operator, camera man and cleaner too. Every pilot who flew people there was In On It, every driver who drove people there, too.
Look at this picture…
Now, if something like that happened, if somewhere like that was built, then how many people would have been involved? Well, that’s not a one man operation. At least a few different people would have had to build the set – the spacecraft, the landscape, etc – and build it convincingly. Someone else would have had to light it to make it look realistic for the cameras. Someone else again would have had to use those cameras to film the “Moonwalk”, and still other people would have had to broadcast those pictures to Mission Control, taking great care to adjust for the time difference, of course. And while all this was going on, other people would have had to provide security, inside the hangar and outside, to ensure no-one got in who wasn’t meant to be there. How many people are we talking to operate a joint like that, bare minimum? A dozen? Two dozen?
… and you’re telling me that not a single one of those people, 40 years on, now doesn’t desperately need money for something? Not one of them needs expensive medical treatment for one of their family? Not one of them is facing having their home reposessed or having their business taken over by the bank? If they were involved in an Apollo conspiracy, all their problems and worries could be ended in a moment, just by coming clean about what happened. It would just take one of them, just one of them, to walk into a newspaper, magazine or TV station office and hand over a grainy, creased old photo they sneakily took way back in 1969, and that would be it: cat, bag, whoosh!
To be honest, I can almost imagine such a big secret being kept for a few months back in the late 60s, maybe even for a year. The world was, after all, a hugely different, increasingly paranoid place then. People might have been convinced to play their part in such a huge conspiracy by appealing to their patriotism, by telling them that even if it meant cheating, and lying, the US had to be seen to have beaten the evil Russians to the Moon for the sake of freedom, etc…
But the world has moved on. It’s now four decades since the Apollo landings, and in that time the US and USSR have gone from being enemies to being partners. They no longer compete in space, but work together in it. That means that there’s been ample opportunity for someone to have opened the Apollo can of worms and spilled its wriggling contents all over the floor.
And then there’s basic human nature to consider, and by human nature I mean, of course, greed and stupidity
Let’s look at greed first. Today, money really does – as Liza Minelli said – make the world go round. Newspapers and magazines are happy to pay out absolute fortunes for photographs and stories that would cause shock, scandal and rewrite historty, so can you imagine how much one of them would be willing to pay for proof that the Apollo landings were faked?
The other day I saw, on the front page of a magazine, a picture of Michael Jackson, oxygen mask over his mouth, being carried into the ambulance that took him from his home after his heart attack. It was grainy, blurry, clearly taken on the sly by someone, but that didn’t matter, the magazine bought it and used it, probably paying an absolute fortune for the “privilege”. And you’re telling me that in this climate, when there’s so much money on offer for sensational pics, that not one of the people who worked on Apollo fakery is going to keep hidden away in a drawer somewhere a picture they took that would blow the whole thing wide open? Get real. They could name their price. Proof that the Apollo landings were faked would be the Biggest Story EVER, making Michael Jackson’s death look like a p26 sidebar by comparison.
And if that’s hard for you to imagine, well, consider this: even if everyone involved in the fakery is still happy to keep silent and hold on to their secrets, forty years after Apollo, NOTHING CAN BE KEPT SECRET ANY MORE. No computer records are safe from hackers, viruses and troublemakers. NASA’s own files were famously hacked into not so long ago by a British hacker looking for evidence of UFOs and captured extraterrestrials. And even leaving Neo-wannabe hackers out of it, today’s journalists have an arsenal of modern technology at their disposal, too. Modern computers and the internet mean 21st century hacks can access computer files, scan databases and search records with ease. They have “sources” and “insiders” everywhere, in every agency, company and organisation. If there are secrets to be found, they will be found. So I cannot believe for a moment that if any aspect of Apollo had been faked, a journalist somewhere wouldn’t have uncovered it by now.
I mean, come on, in the US journalists have uncovered countless political scandals, financial and extramarital, which have led to the resignations of high profile politicians. Over here in the UK a daily newspaper recently shookthe political establishment to its very foundations by revealing details of the extravagant and some would say downright criminal expenses claims made by members of the British Parliament. Is it really possible that a faked Moon landing could have stayed secret for so long? Get real!
Then there’s just the sheer klutzy nature of human beings in positions of power to be considered.
People are, generally speaking, idiots. I don’t mean that nastily, I just mean that if they can mess something up, people usually will. That’s why in the past few years there have been countless scandals here in the UK involving lost Government and military laptops, data sticks and files. People have left them on buses, on trains, even in the street. Details – names, addresses, bank records – of tens of thousands of people have gone astray. It’s a long shot, I know, but I can’t help thinking that just because of the cruel, impishly mischevious nature of the universe, if the secrets of a staged Apollo program are hidden somewhere they would have been lost by some poor sap, and found again by – or passed on to - some gleeful journalist, by now.
And if none of those arguments have convinced you, then what about the role of the Russians in all this? Does anyone really think that with their enormous network of spies and surveilance equipment back in the 1960s and 70s, having been beaten in the Space Race, the Russians wouldn’t have uncovered The Truth and told EVERYONE? They’d have been desperate beyond words to embarrass and humiliate the US! Make no mistake, if Apollo had been faked, the Russians WOULD have found out and they would definitely, I’m 10000000% sure, have shouted out “Liars! Liars! Pants on fire!” from the top of the Kremlin’s highest, pointiest tower, as soon as possible.
None of those things has happened, of course, which means one of two things is possible: either a) the Moon landings happened, and the HBs are mistaken/deluded/idiots, or b) the Moon landings were faked, and the HBs have been right all along, and we’re the ones who are mistaken and/or deluded.
What have they got to say about it? Here are a couple of HB classics for you, mined from various websites…
Why does this rock have a letter ‘C’ on it? There is also a ‘C’ on the ground in front of the rock. The use of the letter C on film props is well known by the people in Hollywood and is used to show where the centre of the scene should be.
Neil Armstrong never talks about the Apollo landings. That’s because he’s stricken with conscience. Proof positive that we didn’t go to the moon.
Aaaggghhh!!!! SLAP!
But back to what I think is the real deal-clincher for people who insist the Apollo landings actually happened – that NASA did the whole thing more than once. Actually, not “just” six times, as I said before, but SEVEN TIMES, because there were seven Saturn V launches, in full view of the world. Think about that. Even if everything after them was a fake, they still launched seven bloody great rockets, each costing a frakking fortune. Why? Why bother? With Russia’s rocket already blown to bits, if I was Head of NASA at the time, and I was determined to fake it, for whatever reason, I’d have launched Apollo 11 and had them “abort” at the last minute because of some “technical problem” and then pause the whole program while that “fault” was fixed, deadline be damned. Or I’d have shut down the Apollo program AFTER Apollo 11 because with the successful landing of Eagle in the Sea of Tranquility that was it, NASA’s job was done, they’d beaten Kennedy’s deadline. Why go another six times? Why spend all that money? Why risk those astronauts? Why not just land one crew then say “Ok, we did it. Our work here is done.”?
It doesn’t make sense.
That’s all in the past though. Today, as the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11’s triumphant landing on the Moon approaches, NASA is preparing to go Back To The Moon, and LRO is the first stage of that return. And, depressingly and inevitably, already the HBs and conspiracy fans are denouncing the mission, saying that its pictures won’t prove the Apollo missions took place because they will either be doctored or faked altogether to show things that aren’t there. A quick Google search will bring up outrageous claims that would be comic if they weren’t so pathetic. One posted comment – referring to the lack of cameras onboard recent unmanned Moon orbiters powerful enough to resolve Apollo hardware – on Phil Plait’s popular (but, unfortunately, frequently troll-infested) BAD ASTRONOMY blog for Discover magazine is typical of the **** out there. Referring to the lack of cameras onboard recent unmanned lunar probes with sufficient resolution to resolve Apollo hardware, he says:
Nevertheless, they did suspiciously fail to send cameras of sufficient power to resolve and independently verify Apollo landing site remnants. It’s absurd that none sent such a camera when any and all should have.Very strange until you recognize it all as a hoax.
Funnily enough, that was written by the very same Hoaxer who made this confident prediction as the day of LRO’s launch approached…
I predict a major malfunction of LRO. Silence is an easy cover for lies.
Oops. Didn’t quite turn out that way, eh?!
So no, in a couple of weeks, when NASA releases to the world an LRO portrait of the Apollo 11 landing site it won’t bury the Apollo Hoax conspiracy theories, as much as we’d all like it to. Despite the heart-stoppingly huge expense, the possibility of being exposed to the world as liars and cheats, and the condemnation of future generations if discovered, NASA faked the whole Apollo adventure, the Hoaxers just won’t be told otherwise. And nothing, absolutely nothing, is going to convince them that six pairs of great clod-hopping astronaut boots really did crump down into the lunar dust for all Mankind between 1969 and 1972.
That used to frustrate and bug the hell out of me. For a long, long time if an HB spouted off to me – or even if someone innocently brought up the subject at a party or something – I would do a very convincing impression of Bilbo Baggins turning into Evil Bilbo in LORD OF THE RINGS – gritted teeth, clenched fists, the works. And believe me, if I had been granted a superpower it would have been to have the ability to round up each and every HB, transport them to Tranquility Base, slam them bodily against the Eagle’s descent stage and scream into their pasty, computer-monitor bleached faces “SEE??? SEE THALL THIS STUFF?!?!? WHO DO YOU THINK PUT IT HERE?!?!? LOOK! WE WENT TO THE MOON, OK!?!?!? STOP IT!!!!”
Now I can’t be bothered.
After all, they’re a minority, and what they think really doesn’t matter. Truth, and common bloody sense, is on our side, not theirs, and I’ve come to realise that absofrakkinglutely nothing will ever change their minds. So I just let them get on with it, and if someone brings up the subject during one of my Outreach talks I make a quick slap-down defence and leave it at that. I really can’t be bothered. In my mind we’ve already won the argument.
Which is why I’m not sitting here getting excited about the (surely) imminent LRO images if Tranquility Base thinking “They’ll prove the HBs wrong once and for all!” because, simply, they won’t. No. I’m excited about seeing them because they will be postcards of a familiar place. A place we should never have left in the first place.
A place we will go back to.
Filed under: Uncategorized
Yeah, Stu. But how do you feel about HBs, *really*?
Seriously. though. Excellent takedown. I can’t wait to see the photos that come back of Tranquillity Base either, as I’m confident they will, right on the predicted date. It may not shut the deniers up permanently, but it’s likely to strike them dumb for a few moments before they can think up a new reason it was “faked”. You can only cry wolf about Photoshopped pics so many times and people will yawn and stop listening. As I hope they do!
Stu, thanks for using the picture. I’m curious to see how well my recreation reflects the resolution of The Real Thing.
I’m looking forward to the other sites, too: Apollo 12 with Surveyor nearby, Apollo 14 with (potentially visible) the foottracks for over a kilometre to Cone Crater, and the lunar rovers and their paths from Apollo’s 15, 16 and 17
Meanwhile, I’ve always wanted to get the HBs into the same room with the WWTTMASSOAABs (“We went to the Moon and saw signs of alien artifacts” – believers).
…And just lock the door.
Andy, after reading your July 7 post, I got to thinking about rounding up this group (HBs & WWTTMASSOAABs) and putting them in the LCROSS booster stage/impactor and getting some fine images of their lunar experience. Oh, and bury them in regolith!
[...] could go into details, but happily the Cumbrian Sky blog already makes these points pretty [...]
I love the fact that LRO is up there, right now, snapping away! It is something to ponder when we can look up, at night, see the Moon, and realize, that right now, this fantastic probe is scouting out new landing spots, preparing for our return!
If you look at that second LRO image, bottom center, it looks like there is a row of impact craters in almost a straight line! Very cool!
Michael L , that row of impact craters you (and I) saw was probably caused by the breakup and impact of a comet or asteroid (ala Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9). Crater chains have now been identified on many of the larger bodies in the solar system.
One of my favorite comments on the Apollo hoax came from a good friend at NASA Ames, he said:
“The problem is that in 1969 we didn’t have the technology to fake the moon landings.”
“The problem is that in 1969 we didn’t have the technology to fake the moon landings.”
EXcellent point! Never thought of it that way! Thanks for your comment
How come flags waved in moon without air?
Why do you think we stopped “going” to the moon after 6 successful trips?
“…they had to fake it SIX TIMES! There were six successful Moon landings, so that means they had to fake six landings, six sets of EVAs, six of everything….How expensive would that have been? How complicated would that have been? How difficult would that have been?”
Budgets were tight. Sci-fi movies were becoming popular, taking some of the best and brightest effects specialists away from NASA, and making it that much more expensive to keep the rest.
Now, if you will excuse me, I need to put my tinfoil hat back on (I get shocks when trying to type while wearing it), then I have to clean this basement. Mom says that if I’m going to live down here, I have to keep it clean, and she means NOW. Sheesh – I’m 37 years old… I know when to clean and when not to clean.
“Nevertheless, they did suspiciously fail to send cameras of sufficient power to resolve and independently verify Apollo landing site remnants. It’s absurd that none sent such a camera when any and all should have.Very strange until you recognize it all as a hoax.”
You know why they didn’t send cameras to verify the Apollo landing site? Because they have better things to do with their time and money than worry about what a bunch of morons think.
Nice article.
Mike.
Actually I can “prove” we went to the moon with greater ease than anything I’ve seen you or the amazing Bad Astronomer put forth so far. You guys are scientist, so I won’t hold it against you. Y’all think funny. Smart, but funny.
You started down the right path of correct thinking with your “how many people has NASA managed to keep quiet” idea. It’s a good point, that such an undertaking to hoax such an event would have required massive amounts of manpower, and human greed and human nature would have made it unlikely that NASA could have kept it quiet one, much less SEVEN TIMES.
But lets assume they did. I don’t know, maybe they shot all the people who knew, after all the HB’s claim NASA blew up Apollo 1 to shut them up. (If NASA was gonna kill Gus Grissom, they’d have done it long before Apollo 1)
You want to know why I know, beyond a doubt, that the Apollo program took men to the moon? Cause the USSR says so. That’s why!
Look, the USSR had kicked our butts in the space race and made us look like scientific hacks. Then their own politics and assumptions got in the way, and they couldn’t keep the lead, and we blew by them and landed on the moon (with people) first. An entire battalion of Russian scientist would have done ANYTHING to provide proof that the USA did NOT manage to land a manned craft on the moon.
So they monitored, they watched, they scribbled parallax equations on napkins over vodka hoping to prove that Neil Armstrong’s transmissions were not coming from the moon. That Mike Collins was NOT orbiting the moon waiting. Anything at all, however slight, would have been shouted from the roof tops, given to the press, and yelled to anyone who would listen:
“USA hoaxed the moon shot! We’re still in the race!”
They couldn’t do it. Because everything they gathered told them the same thing we all know is true. We went to the moon. We came back. We did it.
The real conspiracy is, can we do it again?
“They couldn’t do it. Because everything they gathered told them the same thing we all know is true. We went to the moon. We came back. We did it. ”
Another good point, thanks!
Visiting from BA….What you do not realize is that your good buddy, Andy, has just provided the proof that the LRO images are faked. If it can be done with 166mm, then a better fake can be done with photoshop and the hi-res ones from LRO.
The only way these nuts will accept the truth is if we take them to the moon, and let the get a breath of nice, fresh, vacuum.
Great post. I can’t wait for photos of the Apollo landing sites from the LRO for the same reasons you spoke about.
Nothing is going to change a hoaxer, you could even strap them to a Saturn V and take them to the moon and they would still think they were in a studio the whole time.
The LRO pics are for us, not them.
My dad was one of the thousands of engineers who worked on the Apollo project. He still has the original proposal that RCA and Grunman put together for the LEM. Whenever I meet a HB, I say I have proof because my dad worked on it. They then said “Well, your dad is in on the secret”. I reply, “Do you really think that the secret could be kept by thousands for so long?”
I can’t wait for the pics.
Lets see…
8, 11-17 – I got 8 Saturn V launches. Where did I go wrong?
Only 6 actually landed. But in each, both astronauts walked, making 12 pairs of boots. And 3 Moon Buggies.
And at least one laser corner reflector array, easily detectable from earth with a decent laser.
Not to mention several hundred kilos of strange rocks like nothing ever found on earth.
And a jumping astronaut saluting in mid-jump, and one falling down and doing a pushup back to his feet in a 100 kilo pressure suit (try THAT on a movie set!), and a demo of a feather falling as fast as a stone.
The only thing the HBs have convinced me of is their idiocy.
Thanks for the blog!
You’re forgetting Apollo 10, I think.
Great article!! You’re spot on about the HBs and their imperviousness to evidence and reason.
Hey, I’ve got another one for you.
Ok, the landings were fake, right? They were filmed in a darkened studio somewhere. So explain to me how the flag could have been waving in the breeze, inside a darkened studio! Or did someone intentionally blow a big fan at the flag–and if so, do you still think NASA was smart enough to pull off a coverup of this size and complexity?
[...] [...]
You’re right about the problem of large groups of people keeping secrets.
Didn’t Twain say something like, “Three can keep a secret if two are dead”?
OK. Let’s clear this up once and for all, shall we?
WE NEVER WENT TO THE MOON!!
While we were never there we filmed ancient palaces, military installations, alien gambling casinos and alien jacuzzis. We then nuked them all so the Russians would never find them on their faked missions. We also nuked them so nobody on Earth would find out that alien civilizations ever existed and start a worldwide revolution.
Don’t believe me? Check out the Masonic flag we planted when we were never there.
IT’S ALL A CONSPIRACY I TELL YOU!!!
Unfortunately, there are two classes of HBs. The professional, like the idiot so righteously punched by Buzz, who make their living from promoting it as a hoax and the true believers to whom it has now become almost a religion.
Like you, I used to get extremely annoyed when dealing with HBs, especially as all their points were so easily shown to be purely down to their ignorance on so many subjects from photography to physics. Now however I just laugh at them which has the added bonus that it annoys and irritates the hell out of them instead of me.
But your right, the professional HB or the true believer won’t allow anything to get in the way of their ‘truth’, not even HD film would do it. And if you actually took them to the moon they would probably claim that we needed the time between then and their visit to actually get the items there clandestinely to make it look as if we had been in the past. A bit like the creationists who claim that the Earth is really 6000 years old but their dog made it look as if it was 4.5 billion years old.
Yeah, I guess you could group these misguided souls with the flat earthers, plasma ‘cosmologists’, hollow earthers, the 2012 doomsday lot, electric universe proponents, ancient alien believers, crop circle adherents, etc. Luckily, these people are by far in the minority.
I do hope that LRO will show something.
You’d think that with all that time and effort they’d have done a second take after Neil Armstrong muffed his big line.
THANK YOU.
I especially love the idea that all the people who would have been involved in the “hoax” have kept quiet, and the Soviets knew NOTHING.
The fricking MANHATTAN PROJECT had Soviet spies. The biggest, most secretive government project in history had THREE DIFFERENT SCIENTISTS giving information to the USSR.
So the idea that the Soviets wouldn’t have any clue that the whole project was a sham is laughable. If you can’t keep a secret that could result in the destruction of the world, you can’t keep a secret that’s just a big PR stunt.
Millions of people in this country apparently believe that the earth is 6000 years old. I can take you to a web site right now that says that Michael Jackson was an Illuminati slave, or another website that claims that Hitler actually saved the Jews, not killed them- that he took them all out of Germany to protect them from allied bombing. No one out there seems to blink an eye when some Republican congressman or other goes around claiming that Obama is a communist bent on destroying our country.
Compared to a lot of things out there, the moon hoax people seem almost quaint.
The HBs were gutted a couple years ago by a Mythbusters episode and a Discovery Channel documentary.
Oh, and the HBs would have posters of Mulder on their walls, not Scully. Scully was the science nerd girl skeptic, Mulder was the conspiracy nut.
All praise the laser reflector!
“Scully was the science nerd girl skeptic, Mulder was the conspiracy nut.”
True… but most HBs are male, so I reckon they’d be more likely to have posters of Scully on their bedroom walls to swoon over than of Muldur
Okay, now, yes, “we” (a group of people not including me) went to the moon, but that’s no excuse for shoddy arguments.
Even if the the first landing had been faked, it does not necessarily follow that they all were. A la Capricorn One, the first mission might have unexpectedly gone awry, and NASA officials could have feared that all subsequent missions would have been scrubbed if the hypothetical truth had come out (and I bet they would have been right).
Even if footage was shot of a faked landing, it does not follow that everyone involved were informed of the intent of the production. They could have been told it was for a Frito’s commercial ( see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPVHOzeGXuA )
That said, the pretty elliptic arcs of kicked up moon dust pretty much settle the issue, IMO.
[...] for debunking NASA’s moon walks? By way of Bad Astronomy, I read Cumbrian Sky’s great debunking on moon hoax believers. The HBs are never, repeat, NEVER going to be convinced that NASA went to the Moon. It doesn’t [...]
[...] Atkinson of Cumbrian Sky wonders if NASA’s LRO probe will finally kill off the ridiculous “Apollo Hoax” conspiracy… . Stuart looks at why NASA couldn’t possibly have kept such a huge secret – especially for so [...]
[...] ad analizzare queste “prove” (grazie al solito Bad Astronomer, ma stavolta anche a Cumbrian Sky, per le informazioni e [...]
Many of these same points can be made about the “9/11 Truth” crowd.
Ha! Now tell us how you really feel!
)
The only thing that ticks me off is that we were on the moon 40 years ago!! How come I can’t schedule a nice week-long vacation there, huh!!!! Or a swing around Mars for a retirement cruise. This really ticks me off; that we spend 10X more figuring out more efficient ways to kill each other than getting “out there”!! Sheesh.
The internet is a hoax too.
Google ‘Bogosity’ and watch episodes 3 and 9. They’re wonderful videos that every worthless hoaxer should watch.
I’ve come to the conclusion that if someone believes in a certain conspiracy theory, chances are they believe in all conspiracy theories. The world’s not that complex, folks. There’s not some big secret invisible controlling police force governing the governments of Earth. Vomit.
NASA – The pride of America’s accomplishments.
Long live Apollo!
I’m glad you keep hammering away at the HBers. I think it is a mistake to leave the field to those sad, weak minded folk.
When I was asked to be on the Fox show nearly ten years ago, I told them that you didn’t need more proof than the 16mm film (not video or pixels) of John Young driving the rover, going far away, coming near – nothing in slow motion; the wheels kicking up rooster tails against a black sky, the chevron like pattern of them undisturbed by air as they sailed in their ballistic arc in the light gravity to drop back to the ground. And leave no clouds of dust.
If NASA claimed NEVER to have landed, that film would have made them liars and we could all be HBers with dignity.
Don’t give those hb’s the honor of a reply. You know, there are so may people out there who also believe that Roosevelt set up Pearl Harbor and baited the Japanese to attack. If you look at the major proponents of that story, you see that they are all classic Libertarians and their decendents who are still angry with FDR because he created Social Security!
What are these hb’s real agenda?
I’m sort of new to all this hoax nonsense so perhaps somebody has thought of this before:
Consider the political climate at the time. The Soviets were more than capable of tracking the spacecraft and most certainly did. Do the hoax people think for one second the Soviets wouldn’t have been calling ‘bullshit’ from the highest rooftops, if the US was in fact faking it?
First, there never were such a People as Soviets. The Soviet was the name of the low level councils in the Soviet Union. People were Russians, Ukrainians, Kazakhs etc..
The Russian scientist who believe that NASA has never landed on the Moon, think that NASA made it to the Moon, orbited for a while and came back without ever landing.
Here is one Russian article in English:
http://english.pravda.ru/science/19/94/377/9994_moon.html
[...] Moon Landing Denialist claims) “Fox TV and the Apollo Moon Hoax” by Phil Plait “LRO and the Apollo Hoax Believers…” “Bart Sibrel gets Buzzed” by Phil Plait Michael Shermer debunks moon landing denier [...]
Y’all don’t get it. NASA’s secret studio wasn’t at Area 51. It was on the moon.
Thanks for the post, enjoyed the read.
Hey have you ever made a pixel analysis of the pictures??? I invite you to do it so you can explain me why in the photographs were moon hills are shown the pixel rate is quite different from the astronaut and the sand he is on…. What kind of protection for the magnetic tape of the cameras was provided, were there any kind of shields to avoid damaging tapes from solar radiation?? There are also some incongruences on the reflections of the helmet sun shields.Why the reflection of the sun on those same shields is different from those pictures taken on the space walks when they repair satellites compare with those taken on first moon landin, were the reflection is squared…..isn’t that weird
I’ve just finished analyzing more than 500 NASA Apollo images by Adobe Photoshop CS4.
I enhanced the sky portion of the images.
See for detail: http://members.shaw.ca/alex11/moonhoax/
To my surprise I found the Moon in the sky of several images, I found shooting stars, two landing modules (in the same image) and the stars in position as seen from the Earth. And not a shred of evidence that any Man has ever been on the Moon.
So I conclude that the images were faked by NASA. Then come the Europeans and the Japanese, and they can not see landing sites. Then comes NASA and they produce a black square and say this is the lunar rover. Would u believe yourself that to be true? I doubt it.
Just the simple fact that 40 years ago, with very basic electronic end instrumentation technology they could land on the Moon, but it takes 40 years with very sophisticated technology and we still do not have clear images of the landing sites, proves to me that such landings never took place.
With Respect
Alex
Alex, you’re an idiot.
With no respect.
James.
Brilliant dissection of the H/B psyche! What never fails to astonish me about their arguments is that they never pick ‘holes’ in the really hard bit. Lets think about it. Once you’re in orbit, if you point the vehicle in the right direction you WILL get to the moon. Landing is a relatively easy task of slowing down the vehicle in an environment with 1/6th the gravity of earth. Walking about is… well walking. Take-Off is a doddle. Not belittling the acheivement, once you’re in orbit the rest is a question of doing things at the right time in the right order and as long as the hardware worked, success was almost certain. Why do they never pick on the really hard bit – Getting into orbit. That is by far and away the single most difficult enterprise undertaken – ever. Still is.
Why? They can’t.
Anyway, great article. I personally can’t wait for the close up passes of the landing sites and maybe even the impact araes of the spent Apollo stages.
We never went to the moon. Get used to it.
A**hole. Get off my blog.
Thanks for the great bit of work. I have met these unbelivers from time to time and they can drive a person mad. Any person who can think for one seconed that the American Govenment lied to the world about going to the moon or Destroyed there own trade centre in new york killing thousands of people have got to be off thier rocker.These people are all over the internet and for that reason i dont belive the internet will survive in its present form but then thats another story….good luck RJC England.
Those in power wish to remain in power, and will do anything to keep it that way. Why wouldn’t they lie?
As soon as you resort to swearing and bashing, this demonstrates your non ability to have an open mind. ANYTHING is possible!
“All I know is that I know nothing”
quoted from Socrates
You mean my inability to have an open mind? LOL
I have an open mind re Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, the possibility of Jim Carey to get through a movie without gurning dementedly. I don’t NEED to have an open mind on this subject, because we went to the Moon, fact. Absolute undeniable proved-god-knows-how-many-times FACT. And anyone who persists in believing otherwise, in peddling pathetic conspiracy theories and in preaching their utter garbage to others deserves to be treated with nothing but contempt in my mind. And if you don’t like that position, then don’t come here.
I have decided that it is impossible to reason with hoaxers! Even the LRO images mean nothing to these people!
Alex. I have read your website. Re The Crescent earth Photo on the opening page. I Quote: “That the pictures is fake is obvious, but the quality is so perfect that I’m unable to find evidence of tempering. What I can tell is that the quality of inserting the crescent Earth suggests digital tampering. Also the type of mistake suggests digital manipulation where they selected the Earth from another picture and during insertion they forget to turn off the black background transparency. This is a good job for a specialist.”
#1 Apart from the completely mindblowing logic..with what sort of digital manipulation technique were these photos ‘tweaked’ back in 1969?
#2 I know its a far fetched thought but could it just possibly be that the images are so good …. because they’re real?!
The rest of the site is the usual mumbo jumbo that has been disproved a myriad of times before… then we reach your ‘Conclusion’ page. For a hoaxer you seem fairly clued up on recent missions etc so I am intrigued as to how you resolve some of the Japenese Kaguya Selene mission results that you mention. In particular; as you are aware, this mission did not land but mapped the moons terrain digitally in fairly high detail. This enabled the Japanese to feed this digital stream into modern 3D rendering graphics packages. As you will be well aware as a web designer, the ability to then ‘jump in’ as it were, to any point of that digital landscape and chose ones point of view is also quite possible now. The Japanese did this with an area corresponding to part of the Apollo 15 mission. The results are here:
http://www.universetoday.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/ls15.jpg
To the left we see the Kaguya 3D rendering from the modern day data stream. To the right, an image taken at roughly the same spot in July ‘71.I am intrigued as to how the NASA faked this photo with such foresight way back then?
Your second summary point is, and again I quote:
“NASA LRO and LCROSS (Lunar Crater Observation and Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Sensing Satellite) were launched on June 18, 2009. The official NASA site did not list the resolution of the visible cameras, but according to Wikipedia (July-15-09) one picture it took of the Moon’s surface has a resolution of 56 cm/pixel (22 inch/pixel). That is enough to see the landing sites, so the next few weeks will be very exciting to see if NASA will or will not release photos of the landing sites.”
Well. How excited did you get?
I personally thought they were a terriffic final proof of Human-Kinds ingenuity, bravery and striving for discovery.
However, I suppose you’re still struggling to push them through Photoshop!
Ps. I echo James’ footer. Couldn’t have put it better!
I had the wonderful opportunity many years ago to talk with Richard Feynman, the great physicist and Nobel prize laureate on a few occasions. Feynman, you’ll recall, was on the committee to investigate the Challenger disaster. In addition to being iconoclastic, he was the most brilliant and apolitical person I’ve ever met. It was impossible to intimidate or fluster him.
If memory serves, one conversation touched on the Challenger and his role in the discovery process and then we talked about NASA in general. He didn’t have a very high opinion of NASA management, but he was very complimentary of the scientists and engineers “who put us on the moon” (paraphrasing). I then jokingly asked “then you believe we actually went to the moon?” and he looked at me like I was a complete fool and said (and I wish I could remember exactly how he said it… it was great!) “anyone who thinks we haven’t gone to the moon is a complete and utter moron!”
I suppose the point I would make here is that Feynman was brilliant… the most intelligent, sharp-witted person I’ve ever been around and I’ve met some VERY intelligent people. He blasted NASA management for mishandling the Challenger launch, yet he had no doubt at all that we landed on the moon. If there were a speck of doubt… ANY evidence of a hoax, Feynman would have “smelled it” and he would NOT have been shy about reporting the fraud. I think I’ll lean toward Feynman in the argument with hoaxers.
Also, consider what uncovering such a hoax would mean to a journalist? Can you say “instant pulitzer?” Heck, a simple hotel break-in during the Nixon years couldn’t even be kept out of the mainstream press!
So, I’ll paraphrase Feynman and say that the hoax crowd… the serious ones… are complete attention-seeking morons.
By the way, the LRO is controlled by academics and most academics don’t give a s**t what anyone thinks.
Clete
Oops… forgot to say that my conversations took place about a year before Feynman passed away… somewhere around the latter part of 1986 or early 1987. This was before the moon landing hoax movement was as prevalent as it is now. I believe this was after Feynman’s 3rd surgery for the cancer that ultimately claimed his life (although I could be a bit off on the time frame there). He had nothing to gain by being anything but completely honest.
It is interesting that as we recede in time from an event, people tend to forget and doubt historical truths. Nobody questioned the holocaust when I was a wee lad. Now, 64 years later….
Clete
u did not go to the moon the rocket goes up blows up then comes down while u edit it on u re computerPrat. Get off my blog. And learn to write properly.