Who is Farouk El-Bez?

Factual Questions
1

I’m watching From the Earth to the Moon (again), and there is a character named Farouk El-Bez who instructs the command module pilot on how to observe the structure of the moon from orbit while his colleagues study it from the surface. I googled “farouk” “el-bez” and came up with three pages, all of which were conspiracy-oriented.

  1. Is or was Farouk El-Bez a real person?

  2. Did he help train the Apollo 15 astronauts?

  3. If he existed, and if he helped train the astronauts, why does he only show up on wacko pages?

2

Farouk El-Baz, not Bez, is a legitimate geologist who participated in Apollo:

http://www.bu.edu/remotesensing/Faculty/El-Baz/FEBbio.html

3

D’OH!!! I guess it helps if I spell the name correctly. :o

Thanks.

4

Don’t feel bad, you’re not the only one who couldn’t spell it. I was here earlier, looking at conspiracy theory websites, too. :rolleyes: I finally thought to look it up on the IMDB, at about 9:43 p.m.

http://us.imdb.com/Title?0120570

“Dr. Farouk El-Baz, Geologist”. And then I Googled “Dr. Farouk El-Baz, Geologist” and found him, and made up a nice pretty link and Previewed it to make sure it worked–and dang if Yabob hadn’t beat me to it.