People who Say the Moon Landing was Faked

Great Debates
41

Here’s something to remember, when addressing this very popular conspiracy theory.

At the time, just prior to the moon landing, the news programs and NASA all participated, in a ‘here’s what we might expect to see scenario’, ‘here’s what they’ll be doing when’, ‘here’s a mock up of events as we expect will occur’, and then they would cut to, a complete freaking mock up with sky, lunar module, moon surface, guy in spacesuit, etc.

Think about all the hype you see on tv today about, say a royal wedding. They tell you, and attempt to show you, well in advance, what they expect to see. Only this was a long time ago, so it wasn’t nearly so sophisticated. It was terribly ham handed. And they played through the scenarios on their sets, for days, in advance.

People watched with their own eyes, things they thought were the real deal, but were clearly ham fisted mock ups. Or they saw it, and then were later told, ‘No, they haven’t actually done it yet, that was just show!’ Now layer, over that, all the passing years. I am not the least surprised that people are convinced, that what they saw, was faked.

Not that it isn’t a silly thing to believe in the face of hard evidence, it is, don’t misunderstand me. But the news outlets of the day, and NASA have some complicity in how it was presented, and over presented, etc, at the time these events were current. Opening wide the door for this.

42

Excepting all the people that worked on the project, why didn’t the Soviet Union claim it was a lie? They would have had an interest in making the US look stupid, surely.

43

Why bother? Basically, if someone is still that far in denial about such and event at this late date then there is nothing, including Finn’s suggestion of blasting said skeptic to the moon and letting them look around themselves, that would convince them. People who are that far into the fantasy realm of their individual conspiracy theory just can’t be reasoned with, and you can’t prove anything to them…they are beyond proofs and convincing, otherwise they wouldn’t have bought into such a silly and hokey thing in the first place.

There are mountains of evidence from all sorts of different sources (it’s not just some claim by NASA that they went there). Against that there is…well, the uninformed speculations of folks who are, to put it gently, nuts and crackpots.

-XT

44

Thank you for showing us that you can never, NEVER convince a conspiracy theorist of anything. Once they have built up the massive conspiracy, it is a trivial thing for them to simply throw on another layer of insane crap to the enormous tottering pile of feces that substitutes for logical reasoning in their strange world.

45

There was a show on one of the satellite quasi-educational channels (History, Discovery, TLC, Science, etc) where they took a bunch of skeptics and asked them to explain why they thought the moon landings were a hoax. Mostly it was a bunch of old geezer types with crazy looks in their eyes. Then they had folks explain why the moon landings weren’t hoaxes. I remember one of the crazy old men explaining how the moon landings had to be fakes because the lander would have stirred up a crater when it landed. He demonstrated this by using a large sand pile and a leaf blower, and putting the leaf blower down right into the sand. Sure enough…large crater. I remember the scientist type watching the video of this so that he could explain why it was stupid (like no air on the moon perhaps? And the fact that in, indeed, the landers DID stir up quite a bit of debris when they landed, and you could even see evidence of this in the pictures, maybe?), and just the look on his face alone was just priceless. That and the glove in the vacuum chamber thingy had to be my favorite parts of the show.

It was like the 9/11 Truthers show where they had the skeptic types explaining their theories or reviewing engineers and scientists explanation about what happened. They ALWAYS have a denial or back peddle position. See, it’s easy when you are in their position…you don’t have to prove anything, don’t have to be accurate or logical. You are just ‘asking questions’, after all. :stuck_out_tongue:

-XT

46

I think I saw that show. My favorite was the geezer that proved we didn’t go to the moon because his rubber gloves couldn’t bend in a vaccuum. I guess he never heard of constant volume joints.

47

Yep, that’s the same guy with the leaf blower. :stuck_out_tongue: I loved the glove in the vacuum chamber…it totally reminded me of the OJ trial where OJ was trying really really hard to get the glove on.

-XT

48

It wasn’t just the words, it was the idiot continuing to harass Aldrin even after being blown off.

49

In the 1950s there was some concern that moondust was so thick that a lander would sink in, which was tested by first crashing probes on the moon and then landing them.

50

Which wouldn’t explain the need to spend a lot of money on launching a very large rocket many time. As for saving money, it got spent on a lot of people who worked for the space program, so faking the landing while employing all those people was not going to save a ton of money. In any case, this was well before the time of huge deficits and austerity. If they wanted to hide some money, the funding of the Vietnam War would be a much easier place.

No, anyway you look at it deniers are dumb.

51

Show him this clip, point and laugh.

52

Did we really need secret funding for anti-Castro stuff in the '60s? It was a bit before my time, but my impression was that the president could pretty much go to Congress and say, “Fidel Castro,” and people would start pelting him with blank checks.

53

It’s not worth debating these kind of people. It’s like trying to get through to an Obama-birther. No matter how much evidence you present, it doesn’t matter. To a nutjob, all evidence is fake. Everyone involved is “in on it.” No matter how many silly claims get refuted, they just move the goalposts.

If you’re going to be the type of person to reject all evidence that refutes your stance, you can’t be reasoned with. What’s funny is that these people will reject mounds of evidence that show that we landed on the moon, but scream “valid-counterproof!” at any shaky (usually faked) evidence that might remotely suggest otherwise, without applying the same level of scrutiny.

If evidence isn’t good enough, then what is? Yes, anything can be faked given an elaborate enough conspiracy. But past a certain point, you come across as insane.

Large-scale secrets almost never remain stable. Everyone’s story has to match up and remain consistent, all circumstantial evidence needs to fall into place, etc. It almost seems like it’d be infinitely harder to construct such a hoax from the getgo than it would be to actually do the science to land on the damn moon to begin with.

Even if you took these anti-moon cranks to the moon so they could see it all with their own eyes, they’d probably still insist it was an elaborate simulation.

The only way to deal with those guys is to illustrate their ignorance for all to see, then move on without looking back.

54

This has always seemed to me to be a secret of the human mind more than that of the moon.
You have to ask yourself, WHY would these folks care or want to refute this?
It is as if some people wanted to counter the claim that Hiroshima was devastated by an atomic bomb dropped by a US bomber named ‘Enola Gay’.

Do we have video of this? No? Shoot, it didn’t happen. It is all a ploy.

Heck no!

So, all of that wreckage and carnage was ORCHESTRATED by the gummint.

…

Having worked for NASA, this is one of my bugaboos.
Crud. Don’t we still have a lunar orbiter?
One that shows pictures of the landing sites?

Are these folks just insane? There is no money to be made by these claims.
I can only attribute their motives to ‘that there crap can’t have happened’ while holding a can of <fill in the blank beer brand>.

This is one of the the weirdest ‘conspiracies’ that is out there.
Y’all know that very close to the launch of Apollo 11, the Soviets tried a launch that failed, right?
At least according to this artcile: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/10/russian-moon-mission/

So, given that, the Russians/Soviets would have had at least more motive to have faked a moon landing and yet they didn’t. We never saw their huge first-stage booster in flames, but that is what happened. Apparently, according to reports, it was a close thing between “us” and “them”.
The USA won, in this one way, to stuff Sputnik down the collective throat of our Cold War enemy.

Does anyone remember Sputnik?

Do any of you remember what it was to realize that a Russian (that is how we characterized them) artificial satellite had been launched that passed over the USA? Do any of you remember the total fear that caused? My parents, who were quite sane at the time, were totally panicked. My little brother and I were packed in the station wagon and taken away from Atlanta to the countryside of Covington to live with my Mom’s brother and family.

Really.

Weird, eh?

Got to know my cousins way better.
To this day, my younger brother remembers this as a GOOD thing because he considered our cousins as his other siblings. We we quite close together in age, so it is understandable.
And he was about 4 at the time.

All because of the Space Age.

heh heh heh

And people wonder if we ‘really’ went to the moon.
Gosh, of course we did. It would have cost WAY more money to have faked it, and the Soviets would have challenged our assertions. Don’t you think that EVERY telescope would have been watching? Not just the CCCP/USSR but also France, England and Australia.

You could see our third stage ignition from a doggone back-yard telescope!

Urrrrrrrrrrgh.

But there are no depths to human ignorance.

Thank you reading my rant.

55

[QUOTE=Voyager]
In the 1950s there was some concern that moondust was so thick that a lander would sink in, which was tested by first crashing probes on the moon and then landing them.
[/QUOTE]

Yep. And there was all sorts of other speculations pre-moon landing of all sorts of disasters or dangers. One of the things mentioned in the show was the assertion that the background radiation in space is too deadly (all the time) for anyone to survive for even a few hours in space, let alone a few days, and that this was why NASA faked the moon landings. ‘Everyone knows’ that this is the case, according to glove man. I figure that these guys (most of who were probably in the teens or early 20’s in the ramp up to the first moon landing…FWIW, I was 9 when the first moon landing happened) heard a lot of this stuff, took it to heart, and that this formed the core of their later belief that the whole thing was a fake.

-XT

56

Yeah, cosmic (gamma ray) radiation is a problem.
That is one of the reasons that WHEN (not if, dangit) we build a lunar base, it will be underground.
It is also a concern when we go to Mars and we will (by we, I mean humans… given what is happening now might be China, but probably not USA). Some sort of shielding will be needed. A few feet of water would do it, and in a rotating craft that would give us a very nice spinweight. And water is, after all, quite useful on a virtually waterless planet.

Honestly, the ‘plan’ (if you can call an unfunded idea a ‘plan’) is to send one or more robotic landers to set up a base of operations, and then to send about 12 humans there to settle in and then explore.

But we weren’t talking about that were we?

MODS: Do you want to move this somewhere else?***

57

That’s not how I remembered it going down on that Mythbusters episode.
[/QUOTE]

The pictures Mythbusters recreated were the ones hoaxers claim could not have been taken on the moon. Claims such as “There had to be more than one light source because you can see the astronaut while he’s standing in the shadow of the lander…” “There had to be more than one light source because the shadows go various directions…” or, “The light source was closer than the sun because the shadows go various directions…” etc.

And then Mythbusters took those pictures with one distant light source. Showing that there is more than enough light scatter to see objects in shadow, and that shadows follow the terrain and don’t all go the same direction unless the land is perfectly flat. (You can verify that last one by going outside and looking at shadows on various surfaces.) The pictures they recreated were ones that hoaxers said were impossible to take the way the Mythbusters took them. (Their videos trying to hoax a moonlanding didn’t look as good. IIRC)

I’ve always loved that sketch.

58

Agreed. USSR would be screaming the truth to the high heavens if we had faked it. There really is no way to keep something of that magnitude secret other than killing off everybody involved. People talk, even when sworn to secrecy. Supplies need to be obtained and used to make the space craft, space suits, rocket fuel, earth side support systems. Money changes hands in massive amounts. The accounting and logistics are more or less on record somewhere and could be audited.

But mainly, USSR would have a screaming shit fit about it being faked if there was the remotest chance any of it was faked. I would assume that he would grant that thanks to the cold war, USSR was not involved with us in some sort of cover up?

59

The moon landings were real, what the government won’t tell you is that the spaceships were piloted by Big Foots.

60

In the 50s and 60s there was a “Flat Earth Society”, which I think was mostly tongue-in-cheek with a loony fringe. For obvious reasons, they were the first ones to raise the charge that the moon landings were faked.