I just watched part of a documentary on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's show The Passonate Eye. It was called The Dark Side of the Moon, and it described the following:

In 1969 Richard Nixon and company were very much afraid that the Russians were going to beat them to the moon. He asked NASA if it could speed thing up, and the answer was: yes, but we won't be able to take pictures. (Presumably they didn't have a camera ready.) Nixon badly needed the PR coup that pictures of the first steps on the moon would bring him, so he authorised an operation to create fake footage in case NASA couldn't come through. This footage was what was actually broadcast.

The CIA, who conducted this little operation, knew that they couldn't create a plausible set in the few weeks they had, so two of Nixon's top men flew to Britain to meet with Stanley Kubrik, who grudgingly allowed them to use his set from 2001.

Various pieces of "evidence" were shown, and I'll describe them shortly (as soon as I get my thoughts together). I don't believe this documentary's thesis for a second, but I wanted to bring this cannon fod- er... discussion topic to your attention now while it's fresh in my mind. It's new to me.

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My own simple response:

If we had the technology to GO to the moon, I highly doubt we lacked the technology to take pictures there

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"First rule in government spending: why build one when you can have two at twice the price?" -- Hadden, Contact

I can bend minds with my spoon.

The program's thesis was, "Don't believe everything you see on television."

http://www.clavius.org/bibwgreen.html

Scroll to the bottom. Dark Side of the Moon is itself a fake, fully admitted to by its director.

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The documentary (or rather a supposed KGB agent interviewed in it) claimed that the camera Apollo 11 used couldn't have worked, because the temperature extremes would have destroyed the film, shattering it or at least rendering it unable to take good pictures with clear colours. No mention was made of the fact that vacuum insulates very well, making it trivial to keep a camera warm. To keep the camera from getting hot, the astronauts probably made sure not to put the camera in direct sunlight for too long.

The agent also commented on the depth of the footprint (you know which one I mean), saying that even talcum powder wouldn't produce a footprint that deep from an astronaut at 1/6 earth gravity. Leaving aside the fact that weights were being quoted in kilograms :roll: , the documentary implicitly assumed that lunar dust reacts like powder on Earth, and that Neil Armstrong wasn't doing anything that might make a footprint deeper.

The flag waving / rippling claim was made yet again.

A couple of odd white spots above the horizon were pointed out (after a comment about the photo having been cropped) as being floodlights. They sure looked like lens flares to me.

I would also point out the (never mentioned) footage of the LEM leaving the moon. How on Earth, even with Kubrick's help, could that be faked with no more than a few week's advance notice?

One of the people interviewed mentioned the superb starry background that was whipped up in no time. Yet, as we all know, there are no stars visible in the footage. Also, the footage from Apollo 11 is entirely consistent with the footage from later missions. The show did not have the audacity to claim that every Apollo mission used fake footage.

It even had interviews with Buzz Aldrin, Donald Rumsfeld, and Henry Kissinger. Rumsfeld confirmed that Nixon ordered the footage made, but at no time did he or anyone else suggest that the footage was actually used.

I could go on about this for an hour. What a piece of dreck. I take solace in the fact that it was an obscure show seen by very few people.

Has anyone ever heard of a conspiracy theory like this before?

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ops: ops: ops:

I only saw the last 25 minutes, and I didn't watch the credits.

I took it seriously, but at least I didn't believe it!

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Well, hey, that's somethin' at least! =D>

Yeah, I once joined that program mid-broadcast. I knew in short order that the whole thing was nonsense but thought it was some misguided person's serious documentary until the disclaimer at the end. It was pretty clever editing and an interesting program from the propaganda point of view, but I was a bit choked that they didn't run disclaimers throughout the program. My point being that, theoretically now, CBC programs can no longer be trusted unless you watch them all the way through looking for a hoax disclaimer.

And I suppose CBC kept its hoax a secret because - to paraphrase a Jack Nicholson character - "You can't handle the truth."

Anyway, more of my ranting/grudging admiration on another on-topic thread started by BA:

http://www.badastronomy.com/phpBB/vi...;highlight=cbc

RBG

I was so happy at the thought of being able to debunk something that hadn't been debunked here before. I was riled up enough to put some real work into it. It would have been like a rite of passage. Now that's been taken away from me.

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The lunar surface in 2001 didn't look anything like any of the Apollo landing sites, and it wasn't the most convicing visual effect found in the movie either. I don't think Kubrick even tried to simulate 1/6 gravity.

If you make a program like Dark Side, you run the risk of several responses to it. Some people will dismiss it as improbable on its face, despite the apparently strong evidence. Some will figure it out part way through based on their knowledge, or or catching clues such as the KGB agent "Dimitry Muffley" -- a name that should ring a bell with Kubrick fans. Some will be intrigued enough to do their own research -- as you have done -- and debunk the claims. Some will be fooled until the end, and others will be fooled long past the end and choose to dismiss the disclaimer instead.

The point is to see for yourself which category you fit into. You didn't believe it, and you did additional research to inform yourself. Good for you.

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Clavius Moon Base

The little-known turncoat son of a former US President. 8)

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The BA makes an apt analogy on his web site--that conspiracy-minded people are like the Whack-A-Mole game. You just keeping whacking those moles down, but they keep popping up.

I'm sure you'll have another opportunity to debunk something.

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[nitpick] Aldrin made, and photographed, the famous footprint. [/nitpick]

#-o

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Kubrick also ordered all the sets and models destroyed after they finished filming so that no one could make a sequel.

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Tuckers! Science! Automotive Oddities! Boycott Trek XI! Building my hot rod with the help of the intarwebs Those who would delay scientific progress for a little temporary prosperity shall have neither.

That didn't stop them.

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Apollo: The History and the Hoax
Enter the World of Athran

I think this goes to show how much faith people have in the CBC these days...

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I should just stop watching TV altogether. Sheesh.

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Kubrick doubtless had a big ego but I understand that it is standard pracvtice to dismantle sets after they are finished. After all the 2001 sets were massive, there was no need to keep them and stroage is expensive. Besides the drawings still existed and were used to re create Discovery in 2010 (for which I forgive Peter Hyams for capricorn 1).

Jon

There's no standard policy on the retention of sets. It depends on how much space the studio has to store them, how adaptable they are for other purposes, and how likely they'll be needed again. Kubrick's desire for there not to be a sequel factors into that decision and throws a bit of a wrench in the works.

Some Star Trek materials, for example, are routinely kept as long as space (the warehouse kind) permits. That's because Star Trek is a franchise that involves many productions and a sort of unified "look and feel". When you build a set piece for Star Trek, you are reasonably sure that it can be used for two or three different things with some slight redressing. That's an example of unique, nonstandard sets that are retained because it's likely they'll be reused, and it saves money to refurbish old sets that can be used largely intact.

At my theater we do a lot of custom designs. We did a whole Plexiglas building for The Diary of Anne Frank. There just isn't room to store all that cut Plexiglas once the show closes, and we won't be doing that show again any time soon. So the materials are simply recycled by commercial outside contractors. They pull up a truck and we dump the stuff onto it.

But every custom design involves some standardized elements. Every scenery shop has some standard 4x4 and 4x8 platforms and 4x8 and 4x12 "flats" that can be used literally until they fall apart. There's no reason why a "flat" used to build a wall on The West Wing can't be used two weeks later for a wall in a schoolroom on Smallville. So the "plainness" of a set piece helps determine whether or not it will be retained. Sets with unique designs, shapes, or elements will likely be torn apart when finished because there's no room to store them and they can't necessarily be used for anything else.

There many not even be any attempt to reuse the steel, lumber, or aluminum. It's just faster and generally more cost-effective in the long run (factoring in labor) to order new lumber for each new project so that the designers can make parts lists and cut lists assuming standard-sized raw materials.

At my theater we do a lot of steel and aluminum fabrication. Because those materials are fairly expensive and our labor is cheap, we break down sets whose materials can be reused and recover as much of the raw materials as we can. You never know when you can use a foot or two of steel tubing, so we have bins of materials that have been salvaged from other designs. Our current sets for 1776 use some of the plywood that saw service in previous shows.

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