I've always found this to be the most ludicrous argument. I wonder of these authors have ever tried to precisely time an arrival anywhere. It's just like say, "Let's see, the concert starts at 7:00 p.m. and it takes half an hour to get there and park the car, so we'll leave at 6:30 p.m." And then along comes a hopeless skeptic who points out that the concert must be bogus because when they left their house there was no concert playing!

Twelve degrees per day. It's really not a hard concept to deal with. If the moon's phase angle shifts by twelve degrees per day, and therefore the terminator marches across the surface at twelve degrees per day, and you want to land on the terminator, and it takes three days to get there, you had better aim for where the terminator is going to be in three days, or about 36 degrees from where it is when you launch.

But it gets better. It would be so easy to say that Percy's more complicated arguments are probably false too because he got the simple ones absolutely wrong. But a charitable approach would allow Percy and Bennet to have made an honest mistake. Everyone makes them. The problem is that this mistake has been brought to Percy's attention repeatedly over at least the past year or so. And how does he answer? He doesn't attempt to salvage the remainder of his theory by chopping off the necrotic argument. He maintains he's correct! This boggles the mind.

Clearly Percy's intended audience are the people who lack the skill or foresight to divide 360 degrees by 29 days. That's fine if the blind want to lead the blind and exchange money between them. But the Percy book and video are billed as "incontrovertible" evidence that the Apollo record was falsified. And of course the real problem is that a generation of impressionable kids are growing up with this tripe being paraded around as a viable theory. What kind of scientists is the world going to produce in the future if this sort of nonsense is not revealed for what it is?

And we certainly feel less charitable toward the remainder of Percy's arguments now that we've seen how he handles (or rather, neglects to handle) errors in his supporting arguments. In those situations where the evidence is not quite so straightforward, we're now less likely to give Percy the benefit of the doubt because his motive is a little less noble.