Let me be the first to predict (after a nice glass of red wine) that the moon landing hoax conspirators will eventually “explain away” that any Apollo debris, was planted there after the fact.
—Sigene
Who at age 5 exactly 40 years ago was looking at the moon with his dad talking about people walking around up there.Nine years. 800 odd posts. You are proof that quality far exceeds quantity. I can honesty say I’ve never seen you here before, but that last line makes me wish I had.
Keep looking up, my friend.
What Sigene fails to realize is that the Apollo debris really was planted on the Moon by NASA beginning in 1969, in an attempt to discredit the brave souls who believe that we never went there! It’s a cunning strategy to discredit everyone who thinks NASA has a godlike ability to keep secrets from everyone else on the planet.
The thing about these conspiracy theories that makes me laugh most is the notion that a large group of government employees (or any group) could and would keep any secret that long, or at all.
I remember the first landing - I was 15 and mom let us stay up late enough to watch it on TV - that was a pretty big deal in our household! I don’t think I realized at the time what a huge deal it was that we landed men on the moon, then brought them home. Although by the time the first space shuttle launched and returned, I did appreciate that.
FairyChatMom: Indeed. They strain at gnats and swallow camels:
Putting people on the Moon and getting them back home safely is a huge technical challenge, which means you’re going up against the laws of physics. It’s difficult but at least you know physics always plays fair. Gravity isn’t going to change its nature because you snubbed someone’s wife after having an affair with her brother’s best friend. A technical challenge is a series of puzzles that can, ultimately, be solved.
Keeping a really big, really interesting secret among a large group of people is a social engineering project. It’s a constant struggle against the vagaries of human nature, which does not play fair. Every single individual is a tortured mass of contradictory impulses and interrelationships. The combinatorial explosion involved with extrapolating that to an organization the size of NASA results in a problem space (every possible way the secret could leak) we cannot even quantify.
In short: The intellectual effort spent in covering up a single fake Moon shot could easily get us to the point where there are too damn many coffee shops on Mars.
I wonder how the US managed to keep the Soviets quiet. I mean if anybody would have kept an close eye on the American moon program, it would have been the Soviets. Yet they never blew the whistle… maybe NASA had some humiliating pictures of Brezhnev in a tutu or something.
You’re way too late. hoax believers have already used that one - even saying that NASA sent robots wearing boots to simulate the astronauts footprints!
HBs have also proposed that only Apollo 11 was faked -the later missions were real. Or all the missions were real but the pictures are fake because they can’t show what really happened on the Moon - recovery of alien artifacts or something.
Believe me, any crazy theory you can dream up some nut has already actually proposed.
Hoax believers often suggest the US payed off the Soviets with wheat to buy their silence. Really. I’ve seen a few who explained that the whole US vs Russia thing was a canard anyway - the countries have actually been working together for decades as part of a big worldwide conspiracy to run the world and the Cold War was all just part of their charade.
Conspiracy theorists, meet Mr. Occam, your new barber.
No, they sent men to the Moon to plant evidence that men had gone to the Moon when they really hadn’t!
But that doesn’t work either, because the solar wind would obliterate the footprints. Which means that they must be renewed constantly. Which means that there must be a permanent human presence on the moon, dedicated to covering up the fact that humans never went there.
<MontyPython>Doctor! My brain hurts!</MontyPython>
Crafty buggers!
<Dr. Gumby> It will have to come out!
They were like the cameramen who photograph the on-screen celebrity in a dangerous situation - in the same situation, and dealing with a heavy camera.
I believe the US government had nude photos of every single person in the Soviet Union and the entire camera and production crew of the staging.
What, is that so hard to believe?
Here…
</Dr. Gumby>
Damn it, if you’re going to use the Dr. Gumby tag, you have to remember to close it! I wound up reading Voyager and Mahaloth’s posts in the Dr. Gumby voice.