I was flipping through a magazine the other day at a magazine stand in a big bookstore and ran across the claim that there are huge structures on the moon that they aren’t telling us about. I then checked it out on the web internet and there is a whole site or two about this and with actual photographs of these enormous crystalline buildings and wires running around way high up, and huge curved glass domes! However, whan I look at these pictures I don’t see anything but smudges. Since the moon is not that far away, why can’t the government get better pictures than these? Also, I am suspicious about “computer enhancedments” of photos that supposedly bring up the details. How do we kow that somebody isn’t just computing things in to these photos. Although if they were, shouldn’t they be at least making them more obvious? Why don’t they send more spaceships to the moon and Mars and check out the crystal cities and that Face on Mars? (that some claim are there!)
500 posts. 500! And you ask about cities on the moon? Indeed it is taking longer than we thought.
There are no crystal cities on the moon. The “face” on Mars was just an optical illusion – the same exact region has been photographed from other angles and doesn’t look at all like a face. Sending more missions to the moon or Mars would not help debunk crackpots, since they can always claim that “they” are covering things up.
Moreover, scientists have better things to do than disprove the invented assertions of nutballs. It takes a lot less effort to assert something stupid than it does to disprove it. And, like the hydra, for every crackpot you strike down, two more spring up to take its place.
It’s interesting how these alien structures are always just on the edge of visibility - you have to swuint and look at the photo just right to see the smudge they’re talking about. And (at least in the case of Mars) when you send a probe to take a higher-res photo of the same area, the structure you thought was there turns out to be an optical illusion. Never fear, higher res photos just gives the cranks that much more opportunity to spot fuzzy smudges that might be even more alien artifacts.
Because we spent space ships to the moon and they didn’t find giant crystal structures. Why the fark would anyone send more because some twits photoshopped some pictures to sell magazines to guillible people?
As for the face on Mars, I think NASA settled that as soundly as the Taliban got bitch smacked. The only people who still bring that up are the people who would come up with some excuse if they were placed on Mars personally. The gist is that we are hard-coded to recognize human faces as human faces, so anything remotely resembling one - a oil stain, a chip, a the shadow of a mountain, Michael Jackson - is recognized as human, even though it isn’t.
In fact, it was so soundly settled that even the conspiracy nuts have moved on from the Face to the Doorway in the Pyramid and the Tubes, which are all just as stupid as the Face.
Ah, Richard Hoagland rears his ugly head yet again. Hoagland has claimed that Old Navy, a division of The Gap clothing store chain, is part of some vast conspiracy tracing it’s roots all the way back to before the time of the Egyptians, which is working to either surpress (or promote, I forget which) news of the lunar “structures.” Hoagland was supposed to have a privately funded space probe sent to the Moon to photograph these objects back in '94. Didn’t happen. In interviews with Edgar Mitchell (I believe he’s the Apollo 14 astronaut who tried to do the ESP experiments on his way to the Moon.), on the Art Bell show, Mitchell denied that he ever saw anything like what Hoagland’s talking about. Hoagland said, of course, he didn’t since there was something about the photographic process which was what made them visible, but the naked eye wouldn’t notice them! (Never mind that one of the structures is supposed to be over a mile high!)
Hoagland spins some neat stories and finds interesting looking things in photographs, but in the end, it’s all crap. (Of course, I’m a former Old Navy employee, so you shouldn’t trust anything I say.)
Didn’t Hoagland have some credentials of some sort at one point? Yeah, his reputation is pretty much gone but I thought he was a real astrophysicist or something originally. Or, is that just part of his “back story” and just as reliable as the photos in question?
(Not that I believe a word of what he’s spouting, I’m trying to figure out how someone who should know better got so far out into left field that he wound up in another stadium.)
Alright, you people move along now, nothing to be seen here, come on, keep moving … and stop peeping in my windows!
Hoagland claims that he served as a consultant to Walter Cronkite. I’ve never heard Walter say a word about Hoagland, and Walt’s a big space buff. Supposedly, before he started spouting all this warped stuff, Hoagland was a failed science fiction writer. I’ve not seen anything from an unbiased source as to who or what Hoagland was before he started showing up on the Art Bell show.
Here’s a site which claims to be an article which appeared in The Skeptical Enquirer on Hoagland. And it’s for threads like this that my sig was created.
However- there are some interesting areas on the Moon from a serious astronomical aspect that have not been fully investigated. Oddly, all the moon landings were in one area about 1/10th the surface area.
Tuckerfan, thanks for the link; fascinating reading. It looks like he was just a science writer who just drifted off into the stratosphere somewhere and never came back. Don’t know where I had the idea he was a scientist. Maybe I had read his Europa claims and thought they were legit. Oh well, guess I’ll have to question these things a bit more.
The lunar landing sites were actually reasonably scattered about. They tended to be on maria (the dark bits) because that’s nice and flat and they’re concentrated towards the lunar equator for orbital dynamics reasons. They’re also all on the near side for communications reasons.
Nobody would claim that the landings (rather than remote sensing from orbit) have explored more than a tiny fraction of the surface directly, but efforts were made to make the sites as different as possible.
I saw a documentary once which showed exactly how they faked the Moon landings!
There were these three astronauts and there was a problem with the actual flight but they didn’t want to lose the funding so they rigged up a set that simulated the other planet which may have been Mars but I don’t want to lose my thread so I’ll keep going but there is a problem because the actual spaceship burns up so the astronauts have to be killed otherwise the deception would be obvious but they manage to get away in a jet but it runs out of fuel and they get chased and killed except one of them escapes and a journalist finds him.
Phew! (this conspiracy stuff is really easy to punctuate)
Anyway they said it was a film called Capricorn or something but of course we all know that nobody went to the Moon and so this was the closest they could get to letting people know the truth…
don willard claims there are web sites about these pictures, but until I see some proof from him (i.e. working links), I’m going to assume these “sites” are urban legends.
[sub]Google? Never heard of it.[/sub]