I'd have to say that in the six weeks since I've become an official registered member, I've seen a lot of hoax ideas put forward and subsequently shot down. Some of the moon hoax myth ideas have been so silly, I couldn't help but laugh out loud. Anyone have a similar experience? If so, what were they?

My personal favorites in no particular order are?

1) The LRV can't fit into the LM, so obviously it didn't happened. Oops forgot it folded.
2) On the PAX Show, Bill Kaysing saying that "I've seen 10000lbf jet engines blow boulders accross the land" or something like that.
3) Moon rocks made in ovens. I think my personal favorite.

I guess I could have a fourth. That is that thousands of NASA workers and contractors couldn't figure out that the moon landings were a hoax, but that a few non-technical people could.

"1) The LRV can't fit into the LM"

That's one of my favourites too.
Ive made posts like this before as well [img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_smile.gif[/img]

Another good one is "it takes the shuttle 90 minutes to orbit the earth, so it should have taken the apollo spacecraft 25 minutes to orbit the moon, not 2 hours".

Ive also had a few good laughs with people who cant figure out what's in the pictures. Jack White had a few jewels, like the 'inward opening in the LM descent stage opened with a zipper' (healium tank outward bulge, he figured why would the compartment be open if there were no footprints around it).

Anyway gotta get ready for school, Ill see if I remember any more really good ones for later.

Johnno

The "Shake and Bake" Moon Rocks

Also a lot of claims regarding 'if armstrong was the first man on the moon, who took the film of him descending the ladder?', and 'how did they film the ascent stages leaving the moon, if there were only two astronauts on the moon, and both returned in the LM?'

I kind of like the "where are the stars?" and the "flag waving". Two of the easiest to debunk, yet the HBers still keep perpetuating them. These people need some new materiel.
Lisa

It was always "the shadows" for me. The absolutely simplest thing for people to do is observe the behaviour of shadows here on earth and see if they can duplicate what they see in the lunar photographic record. Of course they could, but none of the HBs seem willing to try. Tells me something!

Oh - and of course Piper's long range photo anomalies. If he hadn't been such an obnoxious toad, it would have been even funnier than it was.

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: DaveC on 2002-05-03 10:21 ]</font>

I made this list of "stupid claims" a while back:

- The flag waves in a vacuum: it's obvious this only happens when an astronaut is holding it
- No bad photos: five minutes at the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal will turn up plenty of bad photos
- The astronauts wouldn't fit through the hatch: there are photos of the astronauts doing so, plus there are no actual measurements to indicate the contrary
- The lunar rover wouldn't fit in the LM: Duh! It folded up!
- There were no unmanned missions to the moon before Apollo: there were plenty

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Everything I need to know I learned through Googling.

The most offensive claim was that the Apollo 1 fire was deliberate murder...

But the *funniest* I've ever heard was: "There's no gravity in space, so why didn't the astronauts just float away from the moon's surface?" (Answer: "They had weighted boots!")

Silas

Silas, I think you win for funniest question and funniest answer. That's priceless. [img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_lol.gif[/img]

The funniest: The Saturn V was well over 300 feet tall. Since the moon's gravity is only one-sixth that of the earth, the lunar module would need to be at least 50 feet tall in order to reach lunar orbit.

What makes it particularly funny was that it appeared in the official Mensa journal. You know, club for super-geniuses.

You gotta be kidding Jay

Thanks for reminding us of that, Jay. I remember it was discussed at Apollohoax (in one of the now-deleted threads.
Weren't there some other stupid questions that were part of that same series?

The Lunar Rover's tires being filled with air. On the website it states, 'early photos clearly showing the air valves sticking out, ..anyone who didn't notice this needs to get their eyes checked'. (no LRV photos were displayed)
It goes on to say.. 'NASA was made aware of the oversight and quietly retouched ALL the public LRV photos'. [img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_smile.gif[/img]

-Matt

The funniest claim I ever heard was the one about "Capricorn 1". Yeah, a movie made in 1978 proves the 1969 moon landing was faked.

One HB also claimed that a James Bond movie (Diamonds Are Forever, I think) has proof that Apollo was a hoax because in the movie Bond finds a movie set where they are faking a moon mission.

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" We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard..." - John F. Kennedy
TheSpaceRace.com

One of the most ridiculous I've heard is:

http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/Hi...12-49-7278.jpg

"Shadows visible in Al Bean's visor go off in various directions, not in straight parallel lines, as expected, suggesting that there is more than one light source."

Have these people ever look into a fish-eye lens before? I guess not.

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~AstroMike

My personal favorite is the one about blowing up the photographs in Photoshop, then looking at them on your screen with a magnifying glass. Look! You can see the buildings and stuff. See, they took aerial photographs and doctored them to look like lunar shots. But with my advanced use of Photoshop, their ruse crumbles like a house of cards!

This one still cracks me up.

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Jeff Schwarz
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Argh!! They booby-trapped their sun!!    --Invader ZIM

People who think NASA could not have gone to the moon, but do believe that aliens are either there, or helped NASA get there. Or - they doubt the Apollo missions really happened, but do believe that a World War II Boeing B-29 somehow crash landed on the moon years ago (through a space vortex - sounds scientific doesn't it?) and NASA is hiding the pictures. (Saw that in National Enquirer several years ago) - the picture was actually of a rare Douglas B 19, all of which were accounted for. It was a big plane, but in the tabloid photo the wingspan covered the crater Tyco. Pretty big wings eh?)

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Chip on 2002-05-03 14:42 ]</font>

Note that Ralph Rene was in Mensa.

Well, we don't need to resurrect the whole Stupid Mensa Tricks thread again, but yes, I agree that finding so-called "super geniuses" falling for such trivially absurd stuff as the non-parallel shadows and such is one of the funniest aspects to me.

But I think if I have to pick a specific claim as the funniest to me, it would be the Van Allen radiation belts are fatal to cross. The reason this one is so funny (to me, anyway, but we all know I'm warped [img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_biggrin.gif[/img] ) is that it is so very much a repeat, in form if not in detail, of the 19th-century arguments against the possibility of heavier-than-air flight or ground vehicles that go faster than about 30 mph (you won't be able to breathe, the speed of your movement will suck all the air away from you, you know).

And yet, the Wright Brothers, Henry Ford and NASA seem to have done the impossible. "You can't do that" doesn't seem to have a great track record as an anti-technological argument.

The (and you can't send messages from here to China in less than a second, either) Curtmudgeon

Here's the Mensa question thread we had here. Quite funny.

http://www.badastronomy.com/phpBB/vi...ic=179&forum=3

I think I like all the claims about the LM the most. The rover that didn't fit, the door that was too small for the astronauts, the crater it should have left, the dust that should be on the landing pads, ad nauseum. I'm particularly fond of the claim that NASA crashed one of them during training while flying it in the Earth's atmosphere and gravity. How they managed that, we'll never know. [img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_biggrin.gif[/img] [img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_razz.gif[/img] [img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_smile.gif[/img]

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...And that, my liege, is how we know the Earth to be banana-shaped. --Sir Bedevere

Oh, and don't forget the coke bottle that lady in Australia saw on TV! That's gotta be right up there with the best.

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...And that, my liege, is how we know the Earth to be banana-shaped. --Sir Bedevere

All of them made me laugh

Speeding up the lunar footage to show that it would look like it was filmed on earth was another. I didn't think it looked anything like it was filmed in 1g.

My fave is that it would be impossible to film the lift off of the LM Ascent Stage with the Rover camera because of the signal delay. The idea that you could practice the procedure and learn to anticipate seems totally foreign to these people.

In fact, the thing that makes me laugh (or shake my head, depending on my mood) the most is that they make a grand claim on some piece of evidence, and in less than five minutes you've found proof to refute their claim. Their research skills are terrible.

Not only are their research skills nonexistent at worst and selective at best, the concept of epistemological falsifiability goes right over their heads.

Their logic works like this.

1. I see an anomaly, A.
2. X implies A, where X is a hoax-related proposition.
3. Since A is observed, I assert X.

Circular and unfalsifiable. Occasionally it's a bit better:

1. I see an anomaly, A.
2. X implies A.
3. X also implies B.
4. B is observed, therefore X is asserted.

Unfalsifiable, but at least not circular.

The missing step is:
3. X and only X implies B.

This simple statement is the concept behind the scientific method. Many HBs assert axiomatically that only X implies B, but almost never can they prove it, or understand why they must.

The funniest:

The pressure inside an astronuaght's suit, on the moon, would cause them to explode.

Classic.

My favorite is that all the pictures of the rover on the lunar surface with the tire tracks obscured by footprints, show that the rover was actually set in place by a crane on the "moonset".

To be fair, infocusinc, I think there are some photos where the non-existent tracks clearly weren't obscured by footprints.

But in those cases, it's clear the astronauts picked up the rover and moved it to a safer location.

Peter,

Thats an interesting thought. I have not read any accounts of the rover being picked up and moved. Do you have any examples from the transcripts or image numbers of these events?

I've also heard the picked-up rover argument, but I can't find any evidence for it. Nothing in the LRV operations manual suggests it is a tested procedure. The other problem is that the chassis of the rover lies below the J-mission suit's comfortable forward reach. Supposedly the rover was picked and turned to save time turning around, or because the terrain didn't allow a U-turn or an n-point turn. If it happened, I don't think it happened routinely.

I always laugh when someone shows me a photo of "trackless" rovers, and within about sixty seconds I can find vestiges of the tracks that have been obliterated by astronaut foot prints. You can find one or two spots of herringbone pattern that remain. Then the standard distraction arguments begin. Remember, first it was "There are no rover tracks in this photo." Then after you show them the tracks they missed due to inattention, the argument becomes, "Those aren't deep/bright/wide/long enough for a rover on the lunar surface," and my favorite, "Maybe those are from some other rover."

These clowns never seem to pick up on the fact that they are the world's lousiest photo analysts.