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On Thursday, February 15th 2001 (and
replayed on March 19), the Fox TV network aired a program
called ``Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon?'',
hosted by X-Files actor Mitch Pileggi. The program was an
hour long, and featured interviews with a series of people
who believe that NASA faked the Apollo Moon landings in
the 1960s and 1970s. The biggest voice in this is Bill
Kaysing, who claims to have all sorts of hoax evidence,
including pictures taken by the astronauts, engineering
details, discussions of physics and even some testimony by
astronauts themselves. The program's conclusion was that
the whole thing was faked in the Nevada desert (in Area
51, of course!). According to them, NASA did not have the
technical capability of going to the Moon, but pressure
due to the Cold War with the Soviet Union forced them to
fake it.
Sound ridiculous? Of course it does! It is.
So let me get this straight right from the start: this
program is an hour long piece of junk.
From the very first moment to the
very last, the program is loaded with bad thinking,
ridiculous suppositions and utterly wrong science. I was
able to get a copy of the show in advance, and although I
was expecting it to be bad, I was still surprised and how
awful it was. I took four pages of notes. I won't
subject you to all of that here; it would take hours to
write. I'll only go over some of the major points of the
show, and explain briefly why they are wrong. In the near
future, hopefully by the end of the summer, I will have a
much more detailed series of pages taking on each of the
points made by the Hoax Believers (whom I will call HBs).
So let's take a look at the ``evidence''
brought out by the show. To make this easier, below is a
table with links to the specific arguments.
Bad: Right
at the beginning, they have a disclaimer:
The following program deals with a
controversial subject. The theories expressed are not
the only possible explanation. Viewers are invited to
make a judgment based on all available information.
Good: The last thing the writers
of this program want the viewers to do is make an informed
decision. If they did, they would have given equal time to
both sides of this controversy. Instead, the vast majority
of the time is given to the HBs, with only scattered (and
very vague) dismissive statements by skeptics. So the
available information is really only what they tell you.
Of course, there are a lot of websites talking about this.
I have a list of them on
my own site.
Bad: The show claims that 20% of
Americans have doubts that we went to the Moon.
Good: That number is a bit
misleading. A
1999 Gallup poll showed it was more like 6%, a number
which agrees with a poll taken in 1995 by Time/CNN. The
Gallup website also says:
Although, if taken literally, 6%
translates into millions of individuals, it is not
unusual to find about that many people in the typical
poll agreeing with almost any question that is asked of
them -- so the best interpretation is that this
particular conspiracy theory is not widespread.
It also depends on what you mean by
``doubts''. Does that mean someone who truly doesn't
believe man ever went to the Moon, or just that it's
remotely possible that NASA faked it? Those are very
different things. Not only does the program not say, but
they don't say where they found the statistic they quote
either.
Bad: The program talks about the
movie ``Capricorn 1'', an entertaining if ultimately silly
movie about how NASA must fake a manned Mars expedition.
The program says ``The Apollo footage [from the surface of
the Moon] is strikingly similar to the scenes in
``Capricorn 1''.
Good: Is it just an amazing
coincidence that the actual Moon images look like the
movie, or is it evidence of conspiracy? Neither!
The movie was filmed in 1978, many years after the
last man walked on the Moon. The movie was made to
look like the real thing! This statement by the program is
particularly ludicrous, and indicates just how far the
producers were willing to go to make a sensational
program.
Bad: The
first bit of actual evidence brought up is the lack of
stars in the pictures taken by the Apollo astronauts from
the surface of the Moon. Without air, the sky is black, so
where are the stars?
Good: The stars are there!
They're just too faint to be seen.
This is usually the first thing HBs talk
about when discussing the Hoax. That amazes me, as it's
the silliest assertion they make. However, it appeals to
our common sense: when the sky is black here on Earth, we
see stars. Therefore we should see them from the Moon as
well.
I'll say this here now, and return to it
many times: the Moon is not the Earth. Conditions there
are weird, and our common sense is likely to fail us.
The Moon's surface is airless. On Earth,
our thick atmosphere scatters sunlight, spreading it out
over the whole sky. That's why the sky is bright during
the day. Without sunlight, the air is dark at night,
allowing us to see stars.
On the Moon, the lack of air means that
the sky is dark. Even when the Sun is high off the horizon
during full day, the sky near it will be black. If you
were standing on the Moon, you would indeed see stars,
even during the day.
So why aren't they in the Apollo
pictures? Pretend for a moment you are an astronaut on the
surface of the Moon. You want to take a picture of your
fellow space traveler. The Sun is low off the horizon,
since all the lunar landings were done at local morning.
How do you set your camera? The lunar landscape is
brightly lit by the Sun, of course, and your friend is
wearing a white spacesuit also brilliantly lit by the Sun.
To take a picture of a bright object with a bright
background, you need to set the exposure time to be fast,
and close down the aperture setting too; that's like the
pupil in your eye constricting to let less light in when
you walk outside on a sunny day.
So the picture you take is set for
bright objects. Stars are faint objects! In the
fast exposure, they simply do not have time to register on
the film. It has nothing to do with the sky being black or
the lack of air, it's just a matter of exposure time. If
you were to go outside here on Earth on the darkest night
imaginable and take a picture with the exact same
camera settings the astronauts used, you won't see any
stars!
It's that simple. Remember, this the
usually the first and strongest argument the HBs use, and
it was that easy to show wrong. Their arguments get worse
from here.
Bad: In the pictures taken of the
lunar lander by the astronauts, the TV show continues,
there is no blast crater. A rocket capable of landing on
the Moon should have burned out a huge crater on the
surface, yet there is nothing there.
Good: When someone driving a car
pulls into a parking spot, do they do it at 100 kilometers
per hour? Of course not. They slow down first, easing off
the accelerator. The astronauts did the same thing. Sure,
the rocket on the lander was capable of 10,000 pounds of
thrust, but they had a throttle. They fired the
rocket hard to deorbit and slow enough to land on the
Moon, but they didn't need to thrust that hard as they
approached the lunar surface; they throttled down to about
3000 pounds of thrust.
Now here comes a little bit of math: the
engine nozzle was about 54 inches across (from the
Encyclopaedia Astronautica), which means it had an
area of 2300 square inches. That in turn means that the
thrust generated a pressure of only about 1.5 pounds per
square inch! That's not a lot of pressure. Moreover, in a
vacuum, the exhaust from a rocket spreads out very
rapidly. On Earth, the air in our atmosphere constrains
the thrust of a rocket into a narrow column, which is why
you get long flames and columns of smoke from the back of
a rocket. In a vacuum, no air means the exhaust spreads
out even more, lowering the pressure. That's why there's
no blast crater! Three thousand pounds of thrust sounds
like a lot, but it was so spread out it was actually
rather gentle.
[Note added December 6, 2001: Originally in this section I
said that the engines also cut off early, before the
moment of touchdown, to prevent dust from getting blown
around and disturbing the astronauts' view of the surface.
This was an incorrect assertion; it was known that dust
would blow around before the missions were launched, and
steps were taken to make sure the astronauts knew their
height above the surface. Anyway, the incorrect section
has been removed.]
Bad: The next argument presented
on the show deals with the lunar dust. As the lander
descended, we clearly see dust getting blown away by the
rocket. The exhaust should have blown all the dust away,
yet we can clearly see the astronauts' footprints in the
dust mere meters from the lander. Obviously, when NASA
faked this they messed it up.
Good: Once again, the weird alien
environment of the Moon comes to play. Imagine taking a
bag of flour and dumping it onto your kitchen floor (kids:
ask your folks first!). Now bend over the pile, take a
deep breath, and blow into it as hard as you can. Poof!
Flour goes everywhere. Why? Because the momentum of your
breath goes into the flour, which makes it move. But note
that the flour goes up, and sideways, and aloft into the
air. If you blow hard enough, you might see little
curlicues of air lifting the flour farther than your
breath alone could have, and doing so to dust well outside
of where your breath actually blew.
That's the heart of this problem. We are
used to air helping us blow things around. The air itself
is displaced by your breath, which pushed on more air, and
so on. On the Earth, your breath might blow flour that was
dozens of centimeters away, even though your actual breath
didn't reach that far. On the Moon, there is no air. The
only dust that gets blown around by the exhaust of the
rocket (which, remember, isn't nearly as strong as the HBs
claim) is the dust physically touched by the exhaust,
or dust hit by other bits of flying dust. In the end, only
the dust directly under or a bit around the rocket was
blown out by the exhaust. The rest was left where it was.
Ironically, the dust around the landing site was probably
a bit thicker than before, since the dust blown out
would have piled up there.
I can't resist: another Hoax Believer
argument bites the dust.
Bad: The next evidence also
involves pictures. In all the pictures taken by the
astronauts, the shadows are not black. Objects in shadow
can be seen, sometimes fairly clearly, including a plaque
on the side of the lander that can be read easily. If the
Sun is the only source of light on the Moon, the HBs say,
and there is no air to scatter that light, shadows should
be utterly black.
Good: This is one of my favorite
HB claims. They give you the answer in the claim itself:
"...if the Sun is the only source of light..." It
isn't. Initially, I thought the Earth was bright
enough to fill in the shadows, but subsequently realized
that cannot be the case. The Earth is a fraction of the
brightness of the Sun, not nearly enough to fill in the
shadows. So then what is that other light source?
The answer is: The Moon itself.
Surprise! The lunar dust has a peculiar property: it tends
to reflect light back in the direction from where it came.
So if you were to stand on the Moon and shine a flashlight
at the surface, you would see a very bright spot where the
light hits the ground, but, oddly, someone standing a bit
to the side would hardly see it at all. The light is
preferentially reflected back toward the flashlight (and
therefore you), and not the person on the side.
Now think about the sunlight. Let's say
the sun is off to the right in a picture. It is
illuminating the right side of the lander, and the left is
in shadow. However, the sunlight falling beyond the lander
on the left is being reflected back toward the Sun. That
light hits the surface and reflects to the right and up, directly
onto the shadowed part of the lander. In other words,
the lunar surface is so bright that it easily lights up
the shadows of vertical surfaces.
This effect is called heiligenschein
(the German word for halo). You can find some neat images
of it at here,
for example. This also explains another HB claim, that
many times the astronauts appear to be standing in a
spotlight. This is a natural effect of heiligenschein. You
can reproduce this effect yourself; wet grass on a cool
morning will do it. Face away from the Sun and look at the
shadow of your head. There will be a halo around it. The
effect is also very strong in fine, disturbed dust like
that in a baseball diamond infield. Or, of course, on the
Moon.
[Note added June 29, 2001: A
nifty demonstration of the shadow filling was done by Ian
Goddard and
can be found here. His demos are great, and really
drive the point home.
Bad: Another argument by the HBs
deals with shadows. Several photos from the Moon are shown
where objects on the lunar landscape have long shadows. If
the Sun were the only light source, the program claims,
the shadows should be parallel. The shadows are not
parallel, and therefore the images are fake.
Good: This is an interesting
claim on the part of the HBs, because on the surface (haha)
it seems to make sense. However, let's assume the shadows
are not parallel. One explanation is that there are (at
least) two light sources, and that is certainly what many
HBs are trying to imply. So if there are multiple light
sources, where are the multiple shadows? Each
object casts one shadow, so there can only be one light
source.
Another explanation is that the light
source is close to the objects; then it would also cast
non-parallel shadows. However, a distant source can as
well! In this case, the Sun really is the only source of
light. The shadows are not parallel in the images because
of perspective. Remember, you are looking at a
three-dimensional scene, projected on a two-dimensional
photograph. That causes distortions. When the Sun is low
and shadows are long, objects at different distance do
indeed appear to cast non-parallel shadows, even here on
Earth. An example of that can
be found at another debunking site. The scene (near
the bottom of the above-linked page) shows objects with
non-parallel shadows, distorted by perspective. If seen
from above, all the shadows in the Apollo images would
indeed look parallel. You can experience this for
yourself; go outside on a clear day when the Sun is low in
the sky and compare the direction of the shadows of near
and far objects. You'll see that they appear to diverge.
Here is a major claim of the HBs that you can disprove all
by yourself! Don't take my word for it, go out and try!
Incidentally, the bright Earth in the
sky will also cast shadows, but those would be very faint
compared to the ones made by the Sun. So in a sense there
are multiple shadows, but like not being able to see
stars, the shadows are too faint to be seen against the
very bright lunar surface. Again, you can test this
yourself: go outside during full Moon and you'll see your
shadow. Then walk over to a streetlamp. The light from the
streetlamp will wash out the shadow cast by the Moon. You
might still be able to see it faintly, but it would
difficult against the much brighter landscape.
[Note added June 29, 2001: Again,
check out Ian
Goddard's work for more about this.
Bad: The program has two segments
dealing with what they call ``identical backgrounds''. In
one, they show the lunar lander with a mountain in the
background. They then show another picture of the same
mountain, but no lander in the foreground at all. The
astronauts could not have taken either picture before
landing, of course, and after it lifts off the lander
leaves the bottom section behind. Therefore, there would
have been something in the second image no matter
what, and the foreground could not be empty. Obviously,
the mountain background is a fake set, and was reused by
NASA for another shot.
Good: Actually, the pictures are
real, of course. As always, repeat after me: the Moon is
not the Earth. On the Earth, distant objects are obscured
a bit by haze in the air, and we use that to mentally
gauge distances. However, with no air, an object can be
very far away on the Moon and still be crisp and sharp to
the eye. You can't tell if a boulder is a meter across and
100 meters away, or 100 meters across and 10 kilometers
away!
That's what's going on here. The lander
is close to the astronaut in the first picture, perhaps a
20 or 30 meters away. The mountain is kilometers away. For
the second picture, the astronaut merely moved a few
hundred meters to the side. The lander was then out of the
picture, but the mountain hardly moved at all! If you look
at the scene carefully, you'll see that all the rocks and
craters in the foreground changes between the two
pictures, just as you'd expect if the astronaut had moved
to the side a ways between the two shots. It's not fraud,
it's parallax!
Another example of the difficulty in
estimating distance is due to the shapes of the rocks on
the Moon. A rock small enough to sit down on doesn't look
fundamentally different from one bigger than your house.
Humans also judge distance by using the relative sizes of
objects. We know how big a person is, or a tree, so the apparent
size of the object can be used to estimate the distance.
If we don't know how big the object is, we can be fooled
about its distance.
For an outstanding example of this, take
a look at video
taken during Apollo 16. There is a boulder in the
background that looks to be about 3 or 4 meters (10-13
feet) high. About 3/4 of the way through the segment the
astronauts walk over to it. Amazingly, that boulder is the
size of a large house! Without knowing how big the rock
was when we first see it, we have no way to judge
distances. That huge rock looks like a medium sized one
until we have some way to directly judge its size; in this
case, by looking at the tiny astronauts next to it. [My
thanks to Bad Reader Martin Michalak for bringing this
video to my attention. My very special thanks goes
to Charlie Duke (yes, the Charlie Duke, Apollo
astronaut and lunar lander pilot) who emailed me (!) about
the difficulty in judging distances due to not knowing the
sizes of rocks.]
I will admit the Fox program had me for
a while on this one; I couldn't figure it out. But then I
got a note from Bad Reader David Bailey, who set me
straight. However, the producers of the show should have
talked to some real experts before saying such a
silly thing as this. If they had checked with the folks
who run the Apollo
Lunar Surface Journal, for example, they would have
been set straight too.
NEW! (February 19,
2001): I
found a site that has an animation where the two images of
the mountain are superimposed. You need Flash for it,
but it's a great animation. The beauty of it is that you
can see changes in the mountain range due to parallax!.
In other words, this animation is support that the images
are real and are not using a fake backdrop. The real
beauty of this animation is that the person who put it
together is an HB. I like the irony of linking to that
animation and using it to show that it is indeed evidence
that Apollo did go to the Moon. I love the web!
Bad: The other ``identical
background'' segment shows an astronaut on a hilltop. A
second video shows two astronauts on the same hill (and
this time it really is the same hill), and claims that
NASA itself says these two videos were taken on two
different hills separated by many kilometers. How can this
be? They are obviously the same hill, so NASA must be
lying!
Good: Never attribute to malice
what you can attribute to a mistake. A videotape about
Apollo 16 ironically titled ``Nothing So Hidden...''
released by NASA does indeed make that claim, but in this
case it looks to me to be a simple error. I asked Eric
Jones, who is the editor of the Apollo Lunar Surface
Journal, and he told me those two clips were taken about
three minutes apart. Eric's assistant, Ken Glover,
uncovered this problem. He sent me this transcript (which
I edited a bit to make links to the video clips) of the
Fox show with his comments, which I will highlight in red:
Narrator: Background discrepancies are
also apparent in the lunar video.
[...]
[Video showing John Young
at Station 4 on EVA-2, with Fox caption "Day
One". Click here
for the transcript and here
for the RealVideo clip.]
Narrator: This shot was taped in what
was purported to be the first of Apollo 16's lunar
excursions.
[Audio of John Young
dubbed over clip: "Well, I couldn't pick a better
spot", actual MET of 123:58:46]
[Next, video of John Young and Charlie
Duke at Station 4, EVA-2. In reality, about three minutes
after the first clip. Fox caption "Day Two".
Click here
for the transcript and here
for the RealVideo clip.]
Narrator: And this video was from the
next day, at a different location.
[Audio of Charlie Duke
dubbed over clip: "That is the most beautiful
sight!", actual MET of 124:03:01]
Narrator: NASA claims the second
location was two-and-a-half miles away, but when one video
was superimposed over the other the locations appear
identical.
[Audio of John Young dubbed
over "Day Two" video: " It's absolutely
unreal!", actual MET 144:16:30]
Narrator: Conspiracy theorists claim
that even closer examination of the photos suggest
evidence of doctoring.
That last line is pretty funny. The
audio you hear of the astronauts in those clips was
actually all from different times than the video!
So that's why the hill looks the same.
It's the same hill, and the two clips were not taken a day
apart, but from three minutes apart or so. Again, had the
program producers bothered to check their sources, they
would have received a prompt answer. That's all I did: I
emailed the editor of the ALSJ. It was pretty easy to do,
and he answered me in minutes.
Bad: Ralph Rene, a
self-proclaimed physicist, claims that the astronauts
shifting in the cabin would change the center of mass,
throwing the lunar lander off balance. They couldn't
compensate for this, which would have crashed the lander.
Thus, the landing was faked.
Good: Rene is wrong. Evidently he
doesn't know how the internet works either, because there
is a website which describes how the attitude control was
maintained on the lander during descent and ascent; it's
the Apollo
Saturn Reference page. There was a feedback control
system on board the lander which determined if the axis
were shifting. During descent, the engine nozzle could
shift direction slightly to compensate for changes in the
center of gravity of the lander (the technical term for
this is gimbaling the nozzle). During ascent, the
engine nozzle was fixed in position, so there was a series
of smaller rockets which was used to maintain the proper
attitude. Incidentally, every rocket needs to do this
since fuel shifts the center of gravity as it is burned up
by the rocket, yet Rene and the other HBs don't seem to
doubt that rockets themselves work! So we have a case of
selective thinking on the part of the HBs.
[Note (July 20, 2001): My thanks
again to Apollo astronaut Charlie Duke for correcting a
technical error in a previous version of this section.
After describing the above scenario to me, he said the
ascent stage of the lander was "a sporty ride".]
Bad: The program claims that when
the top half of the lander took off from the Moon to bring
the astronauts back into orbit, there was no flame from
the rocket. Obviously, every rocket has a visible flame,
so the takeoff was faked.
Good: There is actually a simple
reason why you cannot see the flame from the lander when
it took off. The fuels they used produced no visible
flame! The lander used a mix of hydrazine and dinitrogen
tetroxide (an oxidizer). These two chemicals ignite upon
contact and produce a product that is transparent. That's
why you cannot see the flame. We expect to see a flame
because of the usual drama of liftoff from the Earth; the
flame and smoke we see from the Shuttle, for example, is
because the solid rocket boosters do actually produce
them, while the lunar lander did not. Here
is a brief webpage describing this. Note too that
fuels like this are still used today, and indeed rockets
in space produce little or no visible flame.
I
heard an account that the cameras used for the ascent
of the lander were fairly primitive, even for that era
(this is usually the case in space travel, where it takes
extensive testing to make sure things work properly;
during that time the state of the art advances). Even if
it were visible, the flash of the exhaust may have
easily been missed by those cameras.
[Note added April 9, 2001: My
original assertion about not seeing the flame was because
the Moon has no air, and we see flame from rockets on
Earth because we have an atmosphere. This does have some
effect (the pressure of air constrains the rocket exhaust
and helps produce the effect we see) but the larger reason
the flame is invisible is due to the fuel used. I
gratefully thank the dozens of people who sent me email
about this.]
Bad: When the movies of the
astronauts walking and driving the lunar rover are doubled
in speed, they look just like they were filmed on Earth
and slowed down. This is clearly how the movies were
faked.
Good: This was the first new bit
I have seen from the HBs, and it's funny. To me even when
sped up, the images didn't look like they were filmed in
Earth's gravity. The astronauts were sidling down a slope,
and they looked weird to me, not at all like they would on
Earth. I will admit that if wires were used, the
astronauts' gait could be simulated.
However, not the rover! If you watch the
clip, you will see dust thrown up by the wheels of the
rover. The dust goes up in a perfect parabolic arc and
falls back down to the surface. Again, the Moon isn't the
Earth! If this were filmed on the Earth, which has air,
the dust would have billowed up around the wheel and
floated over the surface. This clearly does not happen in
the video clips; the dust goes up and right back down.
It's actually a beautiful demonstration of ballistic
flight in a vacuum. Had NASA faked this shot, they would
have had to have a whole set (which would have been very
large) with all the air removed. We don't have this
technology today!
This is another case of selective vision
on the part of the HBs.
Bad: When the astronauts are
assembling the American flag, the flag waves. Kaysing says
this must have been from an errant breeze on the set. A
flag wouldn't wave in a vacuum.
Good: Of course a flag can
wave in a vacuum. In the shot of the astronaut and the
flag, the astronaut is rotating the pole on which the flag
is mounted, trying to get it to stay up. The flag is
mounted on one side on the pole, and along the top by
another pole that sticks out to the side. In a vacuum or
not, when you whip around the vertical pole, the flag will
``wave'', since it is attached at the top. The top will
move first, then the cloth will follow along in a wave
that moves down. This isn't air that is moving the flag,
it's the cloth itself.
New stuff added March 1, 2001:
Many HBs show a picture of an astronaut standing to one
side of the flag, which still has a ripple in it (for
example, see
this famous image). The astronaut is not touching the
flag, so how can it wave?
The answer is, it isn't waving.
It looks like that because of the way the flag was
deployed. The flag hangs from a horizontal rod which
telescopes out from the vertical one. In Apollo 11, they
couldn't get the rod to extend completely, so the flag
didn't get stretched fully. It has a ripple in it, like a
curtain that is not fully closed. In later flights, the
astronauts didn't fully deploy it on purpose
because they liked the way it looked. In other words, the
flag looks like it is waving because the astronauts wanted
it to look that way. Ironically, they did their job
too well. It appears to have fooled a lot of people into
thinking it waved.
This explanation comes from NASA's
wonderful spaceflight
web page. For those of you who are conspiracy minded,
of course, this doesn't help because it comes from a NASA
site. But it does explain why the flag looks as it does,
and you will be hard pressed to find a video of the flag
waving. And if it was a mistake caused by a breeze on the
set where they faked this whole thing, don't you think the
director would have tried for a second take? With all the
money going to the hoax, they could afford the film!
Note added March 28, 2001: One
more thing. Several readers have pointed out that if the
flag is blowing in a breeze, why don't we see dust blowing
around too? Somehow, the HBs' argument gets weaker the
more you think about it.
Bad: The program makes a big deal
out of how well the pictures taken from the Moon were
exposed and set. Every picture we see is just right, with
the scene always centered perfectly. However, the cameras
were mounted on the front of the astronauts' spacesuit,
and there was no finder. They couldn't have taken perfect
pictures every time!
Good ... and of course, no one
claims they did. Thousands of pictures were taken on the
Moon, and the ones you see will tend to be the good ones.
If Buzz Aldrin accidentally cut off Neil Armstrong's head,
you probably won't see that image in a magazine. Also, everything
done on the Moon was practiced endlessly by the
astronauts. The people working on the mission knew that
these pictures would be some of the most important images
ever taken, so they would have taken particular care in
making sure the astronauts could do it cold. When fabled
astronaut Story Musgrave replaced a camera on board the
Hubble Space Telescope in 1993, someone commented that he
made it look easy. "Sure," he replied, "I
had practiced it thousands of times!"
The program goes farther than this,
though: they actually contacted the man who designed the
cameras for the astronauts. When they asked him why the
pictures were always perfect, he hemmed and hawed, and
finally admitted he had no answer for that. This is hardly
evidence that NASA must have faked the missions. All it
means is that he couldn't think of anything while sitting
on camera! I think this is pretty evil of the program
producers to do this; a bit of editing on their part makes
it looks like they completely baffled an expert.
Bad: Crosshairs were etched in
the astronauts' cameras to better help measure objects in
the pictures. However, in several images, it looks like
the objects are actually in front of the crosshairs, which
is impossible if the crosshairs were inside the camera!
Therefore, the images were faked.
Good: This argument is pretty
silly. Do the HBs think that NASA had painted crosshairs
on the set behind the astronauts? I heard one HB claim the
crosshairs were added later on, and NASA had messed up
some of the imaging. That's ridiculous! Why add in
crosshairs later? Cameras equipped with crosshairs have
been used for a long time, and it would have been easy to
simply use some to take pictures on the faked set.
Clearly, the HBs are wrong here, but the images do look
funny. What happened?
What happened becomes clearer when you
look more closely at the images. The times it looks like
an object is in front of the crosshair (because the
crosshair looks blocked by the object) is when the object
photographed is white. The crosshair is black. Have you
ever taken an image that is overexposed? White parts bleed
into the film around them, making them look white too.
That's all that happened here; the white object in the
image ``fills in'' the black crosshair. It's a matter of
contrast: the crosshair becomes invisible because the
white part overwhelms the film. This is basic photography.
[Note (added February 18, 2001):
I have been informed by David Percy, a photographer quoted
in the Fox show, that he does indeed believe that man went
to the Moon, but he believes there are anomalies in the
imagery taken which ``put into question many aspects of
the missions'', which is a different matter. While I
disagree that there are anomalies, I have edited out what
is essentially a personal attack on Mr. Percy that I had
here originally. It is an easy matter to let one's
emotions get carried away when writing these essays, and I
apologize to him and my readers for letting that get in. I
make it a policy to correct Bad Astronomy based on facts,
not personalities.]
[Note added June 29, 2001: Again,
Ian
Goddard's work has more about this, including images
that show how crosshairs can fade out in a bright
background.
Bad: A big staple of the HBs is
the claim that radiation in the van Allen Belts and in
deep space would have killed the astronauts in minutes.
They interview a Russian cosmonaut involved in the USSR
Moon program, who says that they were worried about going
in to the unknowns of space, and suspected that radiation
would have penetrated the hull of the spacecraft.
Good: Kaysing's exact words in
the program are ``Any human being traveling through the
van Allen belt would have been rendered either extremely
ill or actually killed by the radiation within a short
time thereof.''
This is complete and utter nonsense. The
van Allen belts are regions above the Earth's surface
where the Earth's magnetic field has trapped particles of
the solar wind. An unprotected man would indeed get a
lethal dose of radiation, if he stayed there long
enough. Actually, the spaceship traveled through the
belts pretty quickly, getting past them in an hour or so.
There simply wasn't enough time to get a lethal dose, and,
as a matter of fact, the metal hull of the spaceship did
indeed block most of the radiation. For a detailed
explanation of all this, my fellow Mad Scientist William
Wheaton has a page with the technical data about the doses
received by the astronauts. Another excellent page
about this, that also gives a history of NASA radiation
testing, is from the Biomedical
Results of Apollo site. An interesting read!
It was also disingenuous of the program
to quote the Russian cosmonaut as well. Of course they
were worried about radiation before men had gone into the
van Allen belts! But tests done by NASA showed that it was
possible to not only survive such a passage, but to not
even get harmed much by it. It looks to me like another
case of convenient editing by the producers of the
program.
Very, very Bad: Kaysing says that
the Apollo 1 fire that killed Roger Chaffee, Ed White and
Gus Grissom was no accident. Grissom was ready to talk to
the press about the Moon hoax, so NASA killed him. Kaysing
says NASA also killed other people who were about to blow
the whistle as well.
This is so disgusting I have a hard time
writing a coherent reply. Kaysing has no grasp of basic
physics, photography or even common sense, but he accuses
NASA of killing people to shut them up. That is a
particularly loathsome accusation.
The utter bilge pumped out in this
program goes on and on, and indeed, if you go to the HBs
websites you can read more than any brain can handle. I
have read literally dozens of things that ``prove'' the
landings were faked, and each one is rather easily shown
to be wrong by anyone with experience in such things. I
think the problem here is twofold: we tend to want to
believe (or at least listen to) conspiracy theories, and
this one is a whopper. Also, the evidence is presented in
such a way that, if you are unfamiliar with the odd nature
of the vacuum of space and of space travel, it sounds
reasonable.
But it isn't reasonable. Their evidence
is actually as tenuous as the vacuum of space itself. I
find it amazing that they are so willing to scrutinize
every available frame of data from the astronauts, yet
miss the most obvious thing right in front of them. Fox
television and the producers of this program should be
ashamed of themselves. Even worse, the Fox Family Channel
broadcast a show just last year that was skeptical and
even handed about the Moon Hoax! Amazingly, Mitch Pileggi
hosted that program as well.
I'll end this on one more bit the HBs
don't talk about. When Jim Lovell, two time Apollo
astronaut and commander of the ill-fated Apollo 13
mission, was told about Kaysing's claims, Lovell called
him a kook. Kaysing, ever the rational thinker, sued
Lovell for slander. Imagine: Kaysing, who says that NASA
murdered three men outright and arranged for the murders
of others, sued Commander James Lovell for slander! After
some time, a judge wisely threw the case out of court.
There's still hope. |
