THE TENNESSEAN

Moon shot or not?

By KEVIN NANCE
Staff Writer

Nashville filmmaker continues to challenge landing with new movie

Like most American youth, Bart Sibrel grew up convinced that the Apollo space missions to the moon were humanity's greatest technological achievement. The son of an Air Force veteran, he idolized the astronauts, so much so that the walls of his bedroom in Bellevue were covered with posters of them walking on the lunar surface.

Now Sibrel, a Nashville filmmaker, says the moon landings were a gigantic and ruinously expensive Cold War hoax perpetrated by the United States government to fool the Soviet Union into believing it had lost the space race.

''They didn't go to the moon,'' he declares. ''I'd bet my life on it.''

To prove his controversial theory, Sibrel has spent much of the past decade working on two films, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Moon and Astronauts Gone Wild, the second of which premieres next week at Belcourt Theatre as the kickoff of a projected national tour of college campuses.

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Eventually he began to write plays and then to film them, which led him into a career in video production. He worked as a weekend cameraman and editor for WSMV-Channel 4 in the mid-1990s and since has made music videos, TV commercials (including a series of pro-Tennessee Lottery ads that featured a Church Lady-like character but never were broadcast) and other programming for cable networks such as TLC and the Discovery Channel.

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Sibrel spent five years — and, he says, more than $750,000 provided by a group of investors ''who wish to remain anonymous'' — researching and making A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Moon, copies of which he now markets for $29.95 on his Web site, www.moonmovie.com.

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Two others — Phil Plait, a California astronomer who has a Web site called badastronomy. com, and Jay Windley, a Utah engineer who runs www.clavius.org, which specifically debunks Sibrel's arguments — say there's an innocent explanation of the ''window shot'' footage.

''What you're seeing is the astronauts practicing for a press conference,'' Plait says. ''And 'not for public consumption' does not mean 'secret' or 'classified.' NASA was simply very PR-conscious, and they didn't want people to see an unpolished press conference. Everything that Bart is reading into this is just nonsense.''

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Astronauts Gone Wild, by Nashville filmmaker Bart Sibrel, will be screened at 7 p.m. Thursday, with a reception starting at 6:30 p.m., at Belcourt Theatre, 2102 Belcourt Ave. in Hillsboro Village. Tickets are $7 at the door."

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THE TENNESSEAN

Down with Sibrel!

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Freedom For Fission A breath of fresh Iodine-131

I was afraid of this-- the article is not nearly as skeptical as it should be, JayUtah isn't quoted, and any rebuttal is at the very end, where readers are unlikely to see it.

Down with Sibrel!

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Freedom For Fission A breath of fresh Iodine-131

The folks over at Fark.com has already commented on the article. Some really gems among the comments !

http://makeashorterlink.com/?G3BE211A7

"Am I the only one who doesn't care if NASA faked the moon landing or not?

I'm hungover, so I'm incapable of caring about anything at the moment"

...... and .......

"This topic came up at work, and, much to my shock and disgust, I found myself in a roomful of people who thought that the moon landings were hoaxed. I was ready to refute every single bit of "hoax evidence," so I asked everyone, "What was the thing that convinced you? Was it the 'flapping flag,' the 'wrong shadows' What, exactly?"

Turns out NONE of them had ever heard the "actual proof." They had only heard that "there's a guy out there who can disprove the moon landings," so they all went ahead and thought, "So much for the Apollo project!" They didn't need proof, just the concept of doubt.

Such is the logical thought process of a breakroom full of teamsters. "Someone says THE MAN lied to us! It's true! Were Neil & Buzz in a union? No! Then they're liars too!""

................ and ...................

"Sounds like a great movie!

Did you walk on the moon?
Yes.
Did you really walk on the moon?
Yes.
I mean really walk on the moon?
Yes.
C'mon. Did you?
Yes.
Really?
Yes.
You swear?
*walks out in anger*
I knew it!!"

....... and perhaps the most telling one:

I "met" Bart Sibrel at an X-Files convention here in Las Vegas a few years ago. Met isn't exactly the right word. "Tackle" might be a better one. He was so desperate trying to sell his dog & pony show, he was grabbing people out of the aisles and dragging them back to his rented table."

http://makeashorterlink.com/?G3BE211A7

I'd really love to be able to go to this kickoff event and give Bart a few - like Ed Mitchell did some years ago...

Harald

PS: I can't believe it! I wasted my 2001st posting, making me Bad PhD, for BS! :x

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"Flying in space is risky business, but just staying on this planet is risky business too." - John Young, astronaut

I spoke to the reporter for half an hour, and gave him some nice tidbits about why Sibrel is full of garbage. For example, I pointed out that in the portion of the video Sibrel does not show you, there is a glow out of two diametrically opposed windows in the spacecraft. (They can't both be the "nearby" earth, ergo the glow has another explanation.)

I also pointed out his gaffe on Art Bell, where he pointed out how suspicious it was that the Apollo astronauts did not say anything about light flashes as they passed through the Van Allen belts. The conversation went something like this:

Jay: Sibrel says that if they did go through the Van Allen belts, they should have seen the light flashes. Well, all the crews saw them and have spoken about them.
Reporter: You mean they did see the flashes?
Jay: Yes, absolutely. I spoke to Ed Mitchell specifically about them. They were studied explicitly on Apollos 16 and 17, and it was part of the mission report. There were also some scientific papers written on their observations in about 1974. This is just one example of how little Sibrel really knows about this material.

My interpretation of the Sibrel video was materially identical to Phil's, so I can imagine that only one of us needed to be quoted.

Jay: If you get the DVD set from Spacecraft Films, you can see the allegedly secret footage complete and unedited.
Reporter: Including the "do not show this to the public" label?
Jay: No, that's just P.R. boilerplate on the specific version that Sibrel received. And it doesn't say "do not show this to the public."

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"Facts are stubborn things." --John Adams
Clavius Moon Base

I mentioned those as well. I also told him that Sibrel has lied about me, saying I work for NASA (I explained the difference betwen a civil servant and a contractor). The reporter then told me that Sibrel did indeed say to him that I worked for NASA when he interviewed Sibrel. I then told the reporter that Sibrel lied to him. That didn't make it into the article, sadly.