Call me stupid if you wish, but recently I got this idea that it is absolutely absurd that people even give time to debunking Apollo-hoax arguments. I understand that it is essential to re-educate the masses who have been dumbed down by the HB brigade, but come on! How the hell did these nutburgers get a foothold in mainstream thought anyway?

When I was in school, all the boys dreamed about being an astronaut. We were taught all aspects of the Apollo missions. Hell, in 1976 I knew what a CSM was, and I also knew how that fellow managed to film Mr Armstrong coming down the ladder (sic). 1976 was 7 years _after_ the first landing.

Am I the only one who thinks that buying the silence of 10000s of co-workers in the NASA realm is a little too full of BS? To me this whole HB thing is in the same league as denying the Holocaust. Yeah sure some neo Nazis out there (and God forbid those mongrels have been elected into parliament in Eastern Germany) believe that uncle Adolf was a saint, but the rest of the _real_ world knows that 6 million people gone is a fairly good descriptor of Nazi policy.

Similarly, there is an overwhelming amount of evdience in the form of pics, vids, and rocks. In speaking with the Australian tracking station personelle, I cant help but surmise that way more people than I ever imagined were involved in Apollo. this figure also crosses the US boarders, and that means the US must have had some serious $$$ behind its shut-up campaign.

man oh man I am fed up with nay-sayers. Thankfully _most_ people I now speak to dont counteract with "they were fake" arguments. I personally feel the fake mythos is slowly dying. That wont stop fruits like OM professing to know all. In Germany there is a quaint little saying..."Keine anung und davon ganz amenge" (sp?) which translates to "No idea and thereby much knowledge"

Cheers,
Dwight

I don't know if you watch my Star Trek, but I'm reminded of 'The Drumhead' [TNG], where an investigation into a warp core accident leads to a McCarthyite witch hunt under the auspices of an Admiral Norah Satie. When she was exposed at the end for the fear mongerer she was, Picard commented to Worf,

"But she- or someone like her- will always be with us... waiting for the right climate in which to flourish... spreading fear in the name of righteousness. Vigilance, Mister Worf. That is the price we have to continually pay."

I know this may seem like it applies more to the McCarthies and the Hitlers and the Greenpeaces of the world, but there is a relevance to the Conspiracy Theory of the Apollohoax. We must continually be vigilant against those who would seek to use whatever opportunities they can to spread ignorance and falsehoods by being ready for them and letting them know that we will do battle with them wherever they may surface. Ignorance, fear and hatred are the biggest threats to our society. The Kaysings and the McCarthies and the Hitlers and the Greenpeaces are use these to serve their own purpose and we must make sure they do not get a chance to flourish.

Besides, it's a good laugh.

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Freedom For Fission A breath of fresh Iodine-131

You're so fly! 8)

I agree to a point, but I do see a difference between the two. Any conspiracy theory, no matter how absurd, will attract some followers simply because there is a certain segment of the population who wants to believe it. Although there are some who believe the Holocaust was a hoax, I think it would be very difficult to convince the average person this is true. The moon-landings, on the other hand, are a highly technical subject that has details beyond the understanding of the average person. The hoax proponents can therefore find it easy to pull the wool over the eyes of the layman. They can say things that are completely ridiculous to the scientist or engineer but may appear to make sense to the layman who knows no better. It is therefore important for the scientists and engineers to continue to educate the public so that they do not fall victim to the hoax merchants who are trying to lead them astray.

Hello, Dwight. I wouldn't say you're stupid. There are many folks who agree that giving the hoax proponents the time of day gives them too much credence. That is NASA's official policy. Witness the flap in the media when it was announced that the Public Affairs Office was going to fund Jim Oberg to write a book on the topic - the national news made it seem like NASA was flushing money down the toilet, and NASA quickly reversed direction and cancelled the deal.

You are right to question the ease of pulling off a conspiracy, and the scale of which it would require. The conspiracists never bother to try to craft an explanation that accounts for those details.

And you're definitely right to question how such an unorthodox position gets any mainstream attention whatsoever. Understanding that process can give a lot of insight on how many concepts and ideas get far more legitimacy than they deserve out of the media and society.

As for why we here do it, consider this. You were a child in the 1970s, when Apollo had just happened and was the epitome of technology. That was the era of the Cold War. There are plenty of adults and near adults today that grew up in the '80s and even into the '90s. Their cultural worldview was shaped by different factors, when the reality of Apollo was masked in the past, as ancient as WWII and WWI (they weren't the same thing? :roll Space to them was the Shuttle, near Earth orbit only, and the moon once again unreachable. They grew up with Challenger and NASA as the screw up more interested in beauracracy and empire building than safety and technical achievement. They grew up with remote controls and cable and satellite television, computers becoming a mainstay in every household, the spread and inundation of the web to everyday life. To them, high-tech is MP3s and a cellular phone that fits in a pocket. Their idea of computer technology is Windows and MS Word. So when they hear that maybe NASA faked Apollo for publicity, that seems plausible to them, when they hear about things like Watergate as a near-contemporary event (certainly from their perspective), and hear such fun things on a daily basis as WhiteWater, investigation of Clinton for out-of-wedlock nookie, Enron and the like, etc. And then see such amazing special effects on TV shows, much less feature movies, it becomes easy to believe it was fakable and maybe more fakable than doable. Add in the technical problems described by the conspiracists that they don't have the technical training to understand the errors of, and the lack of inundation with the details of the Apollo hardware and missions, and you have a ripe breeding ground for acceptance of the possibility.

Thus you have those of us who know better trying to provide a counter to the tide of irrationality. That's the motivation for postings like this board, that address the real technical situation and address the claims factually and logically and scientifically. We are doing the job of providing the rebuttal that the hoax claimants state is missing. One of their arguments is that nobody can give them the answers or will respond to their claims. Well, we do. And to the uncommitted fence-sitter looking at the claims trying to make sense of them, we provide the hard part (finding the information).

It's "Keine Ahnung und davon jede Menge", "No idea and a lot of that".

Harald

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

One other reason that the Engineers and Scientists in this forum, and others work on debunking the hoax proponents is that NASA is not going to do it themselves. NASA sees having to defend things done 30+ years ago against "attention getters" as a waste of time and resources (which it is). If the hoax stories are allowed to go on unchallenged, more and more people will start to believe them, especially if the charges go unanswered. If NASA doesn't respond to specific charges, then they must be true. This is one of the classic tactics used by HB's.

On the other hand, if NASA were to set up a department with 3 or 4 staff Engineers, and perhaps 2 administrative support people, not to mention a few computers, phone lines, coffee machine, etc., whose specific job is to seek out and debunk these nutjobs will run into trouble with some "watchdog" group that will raise a stink that NASA is wasting money arguing with morons. For NASA it's a no win situation.

Fortunatly, there are the few, the proud, the debunk crowd both here and at other places who take these HB's to task, and shred their "evidence" in ways that would make Ollie North shake his head in disbelief.

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Those who repeat History are doomed to learn it.

Additionally, setting up official government paid debunking agents would just be playing into the hands of the conspiracists. From "NASA remains suspiciously silent" to "NASA feels threatened". Better leave that to independent third parties.

That's the usual GLP Catch-22:

Debunkers don't respond = Debunkers don't have an answer to this issue, so it must be true.
Debunkers do respond = Debunkers are concerned about this issue, so it must be true.

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Everything I need to know I learned through Googling.

It must be fun to lead a life completely unburdened by reality.

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

Reality, what a concept. (Steve Martin)
Reality is for people who can't handle science fiction.
Reality is for people who can't handle the drugs.
:wink:

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At night the stars put on a show for free (Carole King)

Can I steal that? 8-[

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Howling from the Shadows

It must be fun to lead a life completely unburdened by reality. --- JayUtah

You can't reason an irrational person out of an irrational belief. --- Noclevername

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

What NASA should do, is to have someone like you, or maybe even Buzz Aldrin, Record a Short, but thorough, Debunking of the Hoax Myth, and then Place it on A Public Hot Line.

It'd be Pretty Cheap, Fairly Easily Implemented, and it Would Take The HBs, Down a Coupla Pegs.

In Short, Everybody Wins, except for The HBs, of course, but that WAS the Whole Point of The Exercise, riight?

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If you Ignore YOUR Rights, they Will go away.

Every NASA web site, every item they have donated to a museum, every talk by a former Apollo astronaut, every paper published by independent researchers on lunar samples is a sufficient refutation of the hoax theories. Ifthey were to engage the HBs driectly it would be a no-win situation. Government funded bullies picking on the little guys or evil government lackeys suppressing the truth etc.

For us however, it is a different story. Please point us to the jugular... 8)

Jon

Hi, you have reached the NASA Lunar Conspriacy Debunking Hotline. Please listen carefully to your menu choices.

If you think that the shadows should be parallel, please press 1.
If you think the radiation would have killed the astronauts, please press 2.
If you think that there should be stars in the photos, please press 3.
If you think the dust is not behaving correctly for a vacuum, please press 4.
If you think the descent engine should have had flames shooting out, please press 5.
If you think the alien reptile overlords would not permit humans to leave the Earth, please stay on the line and a psychologist will be with you shortly.

8-[

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At night the stars put on a show for free (Carole King)

Many years ago, at-that-time-Chancellor Kohl did a nice quote: "Die Wirklichkeit ist leider anders als die Realität".
"Wirklichkeit" is "reality" in German, but we also use "Realität". So, he said: "The reality is unfortunately different from the reality."

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

Swift:

=D> =D> =D> =D>

Jon

I don't think that the hoax believers do have a "foothold in mainstream thought."
No one I know personally believes the moon landings were hoaxed.
It's possible that I suffer from surrounding myself only with the well-educated, but their actions in other matters don't really lend credence to that counter-argument.
What you see on the web and might hear on a very late-night radio show is in my opinion a very vocal and very tiny minority. The rest of popular culture views it as the sort of thing that "nutburgers" believe in, and doesn't give it any serious attention.

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"You miss 100% of the shots you don't take" - Wayne Gretzky

Whilst I also think that the hoax believers are in the minority, I do know several people who'd swear on their life that man has never been to the moon.