Dear Fellow Cyberians:
I’m far too rational to give most hoaxes a second thought, but the following essay did give me pause.
There are many valid evidentiary points in this following argument…enough to make any science-minded person reconsider the TV footage seen in 1969.
I’m enclosing the essay that was forwarded to me. Maybe you have 5 minutes to read this and offer your thoughts.
RiverRat in Canada
http://www.edmdragonboat.com
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THE ULTIMATE CONSPIRACY THEORY.
Did man really walk on the Moon or was it the ultimate camera trick?
asks David Milne
The great lunar lie.
In the early hours of May 16, 1990,after a week spent watching old video
footage of man on the Moon, a thought was turning into an obsession in the
mind of Ralph Rene.
“How can the flag be fluttering,” the 47 year old American kept asking
himself, “when there’s no wind on the atmosphere free Moon?” That
moment was to be the beginning of an incredible Space odyssey for the
self-taught engineer from New Jersey.
He started investigating the Apollo Moon landings, scouring every NASA
film, photo and report with a growing sense of wonder, until finally
reaching an awesome conclusion: America had never put a man on the Moon.
The giant leap for mankind was fake. It is of course the conspiracy theory
to end all conspiracy theories. But Rene has now put all his findings into
a startling book entitled NASA Mooned America. Published by himself, it’s
being sold by mail order - and is a impelling read.
The story lifts off in 1961 with Russia firing Yuri Gagarin into space,
leaving a panicked America trailing in the space race. At an emergency
meeting of Congress, President Kennedy proposed the ultimate face saver, put
a man on the Moon. With an impassioned speech he secured the plan an
unbelievable 40 billion dollars.
And so, says Rene (and a growing number of astro-physicists are beginning to
agree with him), the great Moon hoax was born. Between 1969 and 1972,
seven Apollo ships headed to the Moon. Six claim to have made it, with the
ill fated Apollo 13 - whose oxygen tanks apparently exploded halfway - being
the only casualties. But with the exception of the known rocks, which could
have been easily mocked up in a lab, the photographs and film footage are
the only proof that the Eagle ever landed. And Rene believes they’re fake.
For a start, he says, the TV footage was hopeless.
The world tuned in to watch what looked like two blurred white ghosts
gambol through rocks and dust. Part of the reason for the low quality was
that, strangely, NASA provided no direct link up. So networks actually had
to film “man’s greatest achievement” from a TV screen in Houston -a
deliberate ploy, says Rene, so that nobody could properly examine it.
By contrast, the still photos were stunning. Yet that’s just the
problem.
The astronauts took thousands of pictures, each one perfectly exposed
and sharply focused. Not one was badly composed or even blurred. As Rene
points out, that’s not all:
- The cameras had no white meters or view ponders. So the astronauts
achieved this feat without being able to see what they were doing. - There film stock was unaffected by the intense peaks and powerful
cosmic radiation on the Moon, conditions that should have made it
useless. - They managed to adjust their cameras, change film and swap filters
in pressurized clubs. It should have been almost impossible without the use
of their fingers.
Award winning British photographer David Persey is convinced the
pictures are fake. His astonishing findings are explained alongside the
pictures on these pages, but the basic points are as follows:
- The shadows could only have been created with multiple light sources
and, in particular, powerful spotlights. But the only light source on
the Moon was the sun. - The American flag and the words “United States” are always brightly
lit, even when everything around is in shadow. - Not one still picture matches the film footage, yet NASA claims both
were shot at the same time. - The pictures are so perfect each one would have taken a slick
advertising agency hours to put them together. But the astronauts
managed it repeatedly.
David Persey believes the mistakes were deliberate, left there by
“whistle blowers”, who were keen for the truth to one day get out. If
Persey is right and the pictures are fake, then we’ve only NASA’s word
that man ever went to the Moon. And, asks Rene, why would anyone fake
pictures of an event that actually happened?
The questions don’t stop there. Outer space is awash with deadly
radiation that emanates from solar flares firing out from the sun.
Standard astronauts orbiting Earth in near space, like those who recently
fixed the Hubble telescope, are protected by the Earth’s Van Allen belt.
But the Moon is to 240,000 miles distant, way outside this safe band. And,
during the Apollo flights, astronomical data shows there were no less than
1,485 such flares.
John Mauldin, a physicist who works for NASA, once said shielding at
least two meters thick would be needed. Yet the walls of the Lunar
Landers, which took astronauts from the spaceship to the moons surface were,
said NASA, “about the thickness of heavy duty aluminum foil”. How could
that stop this deadly radiation?
And if the astronauts were protected by their space suits, why
didn’t rescue workers use such protective gear at the Chernobyl
meltdown, which released only a fraction of the dose astronauts would
encounter?
Not one Apollo astronaut ever contracted cancer - not even the Apollo 16
crew who were on their way to the Moon when a big flare started.
“They should have been fried,” says Rene. Furthermore, every Apollo mission
before number 11 (the first to the Moon) was plagued with around 20,000
defects a-piece. Yet, with the exception of Apollo 13, NASA claims there
wasn’t one major technical problem on any of their Moon missions. Just one
deffect could have blown the whole thing. “The odds against these are so
unlikely that God must have been
the co-pilot,” says Rene.
Several years after NASA claimed its first Moon landing, Buzz Aldrin
“the second man on the Moon” - was asked at a banquet what it felt like
to step on to the lunar surface. Aldrin staggered to his feet and left the
room crying uncontrollably. It would not be the last time he did this.
“It strikes me he’s suffering from trying to live out a very big
lie,” says Rene. Aldrin may also fear for his life. Virgil Grissom, a
NASA astronaut who baited the Apollo program, was due to pilot Apollo 1 as
part of the landings build up. In January 1967, he hung a lemon on his
Apollo capsule (in the US, unroadworthy cars are called lemons) and told his
wife Betty: “if there is ever a serious accident in the space program, it’s
likely to be me.”
Nobody knows what fuelled his fears, but by the end of the month he
and his two co-pilots were dead, burnt to death during a test run when
their capsule, pumped full of high pressure pure oxygen, exploded.
Scientists couldn’t believe NASA’s carelessness - even chemistry students
in high school know high-pressure oxygen is extremely explosive. In fact,
before the first manned Apollo fight even cleared the launch pad, a total of
11 would-be astronauts were dead. Apart from the three who were
incinerated, seven died in plane crashes and one in a car smash. Now this
is a spectacular accident rate. “One wonders if these ‘accidents’ weren’t
NASA’s way of correcting mistakes,” says Rene. “Of saying that some of
these men didn’t have the sort of ‘right
stuff’ they were looking for.”
NASA won’t respond to any of these claims, their press office will
only say that the Moon landings happened and the pictures are real. But a
NASA public affairs officer called Julian Scheer once delighted 200 guests
at a private party with footage of astronauts apparently on a landscape.
It had been made on a mission film set and was identical to what NASA
claimed was they real lunar landscape. “The purpose of this film,” Scheer
told the enthralled group, “is to indicate that you really can fake things
on the ground, almost to the point of deception.” He then invited his
audience to “come to your own decision about whether or not man actually did
walk on the Moon”.
A sudden attack of honesty? You bet, says Rene, who claims the only
real thing about the Apollo missions were the lift offs. The astronauts
simply have to be on board, he says, in case the rocket exploded. “It was
the easiest way to ensure NASA wasn’t left with three astronauts who ought
to be dead,” he claims, adding that they came down a day or so later, out of
the public eye (global surveillance wasn’t what it is now) and into the safe
hands of NASA officials, who whisked them off to prepare for the big day a
week later.
And now NASA is planning another giant step - project Outreach, a 1
trillion dollar manned mission to Mars. “Think what they’ll be able to
mock up with today’s computer graphics,” says Rene chillingly. “Special
effects was in its infancy in the 60s. This time round we will have no way
of determining the truth.”
Space oddities:
-
Apollo 14 astronaut Allen Shepard played golf on the Moon. In
front of a worldwide TV audience, Mission Control teased him about
slicing the ball to the right. Yet a slice is caused by uneven air flow
over the ball. The Moon has no atmosphere and no air. -
A camera panned upwards to catch Apollo 16’s Lunar Lander lifting
off the Moon. Who did the filming? -
One NASA picture from Apollo 11 is looking up at Neil Armstrong
about to take his giant step for mankind. The photographer must have
been lying on the planet surface. If Armstrong was the first man on the
Moon, then who took the shot? -
The pressure inside a space suit was greater than inside a football.
The astronauts should have been puffed out like the Michelin Man,
but were seen freely bending their joints. -
The Moon landings took place during the Cold War. Why didn’t
America make a signal on the moon that could be seen from earth? The PR
would have been phenomenal and it could have been easily done with
magnesium flares. -
Text from pictures in the article. Only two men walked on the Moon
during the Apollo 12 mission. Yet the astronaut reflected in the visor
has no camera. Who took the shot? -
The flags shadow goes behind the rock so doesn’t match the dark line
in the foreground, which looks like a line cord. So the shadow to the
lower right of the spaceman must be the flag. Where is his shadow? And why
is the flag fluttering?