[moon landings] examine the evidence, such as it is

What strikes me most about the fake moon landing controversy is how unscholastic the debate is, just as with the Kennedy assassination.

I don’t know about you but I want to see evidence [proof is impossible, of course] and what constitutes evidence ranges from events to testimony from someone we would consider reputable.

What I’m not remotely interested in is this from the Telegraph readers:

# Have any of the conspiracy theorists been to the moon to know how things are meant to happen? I think not.

So anyone who raises a question can be instantly dismissed as a ‘conspiracy theorist’, yes and one has to go to the moon first in order to comment on it? This is evidence, is it?

# I was also disgusted with the recent publication of photos of crop circles with some gibberish about them being extra terrestrial in nature, when clearly it is just wanton vandalism.

Evidence please?

# What absolute crap! My Father was involved in the space program and his cameras brought you the first pictures back from the moon and on into the Voyager missions.

His father. So, second hand testimony and his unimpeachable source – his father. Who was his father?

# "Why are you giving even the remotest amount of credence to this long-disproved 'conspiracy' theory? Yet another example of how the Daily Telegraph has succumbed to 'dumbing down'"

Er … what does this actually prove or disprove?

# Personally, I think that this puts the Telegraph on par with The Sun. I am stunned that a mainstream newspaper dignifies this bilge by printing it.

While it is true that the Telegraph is looking for summer readership and this is always a topic which leads to controversy, are they wrong to run it? There’s a comments section for readers to refute the allegations.

On the Marcus Allen youtube [see below], here is the state of the debate in comments:

1maxperry (1 week ago) COME ON!!! if we're gonna be honest if you actually looked at ALL the facts (not just the ones you get from your conspiracy websites) you may actually realise that it is you who is the 'stupid fucker, blind idiot'.  you dumbass

rockync7 (1 week ago) let the dumb asses be dumb asses, thats why they lie like this, stupid fuckers believe it....i feel so sad most are blind idiots,  they are easy to fool, same with JFK and 9/11...damn ,people are morons

One commenter summed up the state of the debate with:

One of the most corrosive things about those who wish to prove the Moon landing I fear, are those who try to furnish proofs with Bad Science. Such as Al Frick, who suggests that one can simply go buy a $100 telescope and look for the flag... As far as I am aware, there is no telescope on Earth (or Hubble, for that matter) that is capable of such a feat, let alone an inexpensive one bought at your local store. These people are as damaging as the doubters.

That was good and this comment is also closer to the type of thing I’d like to see in the debate:

I don't believe the landings were faked, but I would enjoy reading scientific counterarguments to the 10 points above. They are by no means self-evidently false.

At last, an actual attempt to examine the facts as far as they can be ascertained.



So let’s list some of the evidence:

1. When the astronauts are putting up the American flag it waves. There is no wind on the Moon.

2. No stars are visible in the pictures taken by the Apollo astronauts from the surface of the Moon.

3. No blast crater is visible in the pictures taken of the lunar landing module.

4. The landing module weighed 17 tons and yet sat on top of the sand making no impression. Next to it astronauts’ footprints can be seen in the sand.

5. The footprints in the fine lunar dust, with no moisture or atmosphere or strong gravity, are unexpectedly well preserved, as if made in wet sand.

6. When the landing module took off from the Moon’s surface there is no visible flame from the rocket.

7. If you speed up the film of the astronauts walking on the Moon’s surface they look like they were filmed on Earth and slowed down.

8. The astronauts could not have survived the trip because of exposure to radiation from the Van Allen radiation belt.

9. The rocks brought back from the Moon are identical to rocks collected by scientific expeditions to Antarctica.

10. All six Moon landings happened during the Nixon administration. No other national leader has claimed to have landed astronauts on the Moon, despite 40 years of rapid technological development.

11. Regarding this last one - it carefully ignores the fact that Apollo VIII went to the Moon when Lyndon Johnson was President? [At the time Nixon was only President elect].

12. Not one astronaut referred to the lunar temperature (none of the 12).

13. No rope or extraction device was taken in case an astronaut fell into crater.

14. No close-up images from the Apollo 15-17 SIM cameras have been released.

15. There were two Houston Controls: DoD/CIA/NSA controlled and civilian controlled NASA (after DoD authorized all released info).

16. Considering that both Japan and China have had lunar probes in satellite of the moon and they are equipped with hi-resolution camera's, one would imagine they would have images of the Apollo landing site.

17. Lunar Laser Ranging Experiment.

18. It was dust, not sand. If you removed the landing module you would see the impressions left behind.

19. Van Allen - they weren't exposed to enough radiation to make them sick, much less kill them, although long-term effects are possible.

20. The famous rock with a C on it! Oddly enough, if you look at the original, the "C" isn't there; it only appears later in the reproductions.

21. The most obvious giveaway is the dead straight horizontal line across the "Moon" set where the stage meets the cardboard "hills".

22. They started developing Concorde in 1956 and first flight was not till 1969, with 50 years aviation experience and supersonic flight since 1946 yet in 7 years they went from no space experience to the Moon?

23. "Moon rocks are absolutely unique," says Dr. David McKay, Chief Scientist for Planetary Science and Exploration at NASA's Johnson Space Center (JSC). McKay is a member of the group that oversees the Lunar Sample Laboratory Facility at JSC where most of the Moon rocks are stored. "They differ from Earth rocks in many respects," he added.

"For example," explains Dr. Marc Norman, a lunar geologist at the University of Tasmania, "lunar samples have almost no water trapped in their crystal structure, and common substances such as clay minerals that are ubiquitous on Earth are totally absent in Moon rocks."

24. If the moon landing were fake, do you think the Soviets who did monitor all the expeditions will have stayed silent ,knowing it was a fake?

25. Yes, they would stay silent if there’s were also fake and Soviet cosmonauts met with disaster which the Soviets would not want known. For example, here was even a soviet mission to orbit the moon in 1962, but the three crew memebers instead floated off into space. see Alexis Belokoniov and Ludmilla Serakovna.

26. Just thought you would like to know that the LEM used hypergolics to make sure it got somewhere in space and come back. It's just a chemical mix that reacts violently with each other and makes expanding gas, try it in you kitchen! The fuel is monomethyl hydrazine (MMH) and the oxidizer is nitrogen tetroxide (N2O4).

27. Did you watch the experiment where an astronaut dropped an eagle feather and a hammer simultaneously to demonstrate that, in the lack of atmosphere, they fell at the same rate?

28. Did you watch the silly way that the lunar rover jounced and bounced in the low gravity in a way that it never would on Earth?

29. How about the huge roostertails of dust that it threw up and the way that they floated back down in a way that they never would except in low gravity and in the absence of atmosphere?

30. How about the images of the lunar modules taken from space probes?

31. Or the ungainly bunny-hopping that would never have been possible on Earth?

32. Hasselblad themselves are curious about the films, especially as the only protection from radioactivity was 'silver paint'.

33. But the 'dust that came back down' avoided the shiny landing pads?

34. NASA view.

35. The astronauts crossed the Van Allen belts at 25000 mph. Their exposure was too short to do harm.

36. The rocks which came back were the same as those found in Antarctica.

36. A diagonal strut across the flag was used to keep it open. You can see it in some of the pictures.

37. Here's a detailed timeline with links.

Conclusion

I don’t know. It seems lineball.

What I do know is that statements like, ‘Oh, let’s forget this bilge, I’m sick to death of it! The Telegraph should be ashamed of itself,’ are hardly helpful and fall into the category ‘bilge' themselves.

Why is it bilge to want to find answers to unanswered questions or where anomalies seem to exist? The Diana enquiries have been, quite frankly, badly done and that topic is by no means closed. So why should this one about the moon landings be closed?

Another worry is that on a page of videos supposedly showing evidence of the hoax, the videos have been removed by some external source, claiming violation of terms and conditions. Why? How does presenting interviews and footage violate terms and conditions?

Also, one can have a far-fetched theory which one then waits to see either supported or unsupported by subsequent events. One such idea is that the James Bond films seem to reflect things going on quite accurately. Under the guise of being a ferrago of fantasy, some things are slipped in which are more accurate than supposed but are lost in all the other stretches of credulity which abound.

In DAD, the laser technology in Iceland was paralleled by an earlier Star Wars SDI base in Iceland. In DAF, Sean Connery stealing a buggy from a desert dome where the moon landing was being filmed was indicative. In QofS, Mr. White utters his famous: 'The first thing you should know about us is …'

Not proof of anything, I know but interesting nonetheless and they sit on the shelf at the back of the mind. The Manchurian Candidate was of more than passing interest to JFK so why shouldn’t that be so with other films as well?

I confess I like to look at seemingly far-fetched theories and rather than say, ‘What hogwash,’ I’d prefer to say, ‘Show us the evidence.’ Then, rather than decide for myself, from my amateur position, rather than assume the mantle of omnipotence which many of the commenters at the beginning of this post appear to do, I’d prefer to say to the detractors, ‘Show us the evidence which leads you to disbelieve this.’

Then the question remains open, with each of us leaning one way or the other.

Interesting page.
Another interesting page on the telemetry tapes.
NASA airbrushing.
The light and photoshoot, Honeysuckle Creek.
The Russian link.
Stupid sites [usually anti-hoax].
The Marcus Allen youtube.