A couple days ago, my copy of the Charles T. Hawkins "How America Faked the Moon Landings" arrived.

Much of the book looks like it was copied from one of our favorite sites NASAscam, except that the foul language has been deleted. I think this book is just the book version of the website.

The book does follow the outline presented on the moonbloopers site including the use of the Whizkids to help prove the moon landings were fake. #-o If these kids are the future, our planet is in trouble.

One very humorous note. In the early part of the book, he claims to be the victim of Chemtrails.

I'll post more as I read more.

So I guess the hypothesis that the book doesn't exist has been disconfirmed, eh? :wink:

Well shiver me timbers, there really is a book!

I hope you can make it all the way through the book without losing your lunch. Please report back to us; I'm very interested in hearing more.

...he claims to be the victim of Chemtrails

And the Illuminati? Men In Black? Masonic Lodge? Warren Commission?

If the photographs on the Moonbloopers website are anything to go by, he's likely to end up the "victim" of people in white coats.

Whats the bibliography say?

Who made the book?

Hey, do we have any other BABBers in Texas, ready to make an emergency trip to Houston? jrkeller might be overcome by stupidity and need our help. He's a brave man to tackle that book without some backup.
8-[

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I thought these books were all confiscated by the CIA. How did you get one? Are you a Paid NASA Disinformation Agent?

Its more than obvious. the Hawkins book is a fake. jrkeller wanted to discredit Hawkins so he wrote the entire book himself, got it published and put his name on it!!!

:-P


[the above is just a joke. :-) ]

If the book is as badly researched as the moonbloopers site, I'm going to want my money back.

I was at Amazon the other day and happened to look up the book again and noticed that it had delivery estimates, meaning that it seems actually to exist.

I'm looking at the "special effects" page. (They don't allow deep-linking so you'll have to navigate to it from the home page.)

The first picture shows the LLTV in flight. The blue sky in the background is interpreted as a "blue screen" for chromakeying purposes. Chromakeys certainly existed in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but they were of extremely poor quality and worked only for television. In 1964 the sodium screen technology (yellow screens) produced the best results, but the patent to it was owned by Disney. MGM later hired the same photographic engineer that Disney had used and had him produce a process for them, which used blue as the key color. Green did not come about until the mid-1990s when photochemical separation was supplanted by digital compositing. But in 1969 the best quality color separations came from black-screen compositing. The models, etc., were simply shot against a piece of black felt.

Undoubtedly the picture...was the end result of a pretty good editing job by NASA artists.

Actually it's the end result of a pretty ****-poor editing job by the Whiz Kids and/or Hawkins. The remote crane head wasn't invented until about 1987, and that particular model of head and the camera associated with it date to the mid to late 1990s. If you're going to fake a picture of someone faking a movie in the 1960s, don't use pictures of modern equipment.

There is not one solid piece of evidence that NASA's LLTV spacecraft was ever capable of flying in this fashion.

Well, not if you explain away the hours of test flight film footage by lying about where it came from. Fortunately there are eyewitnesses to the flights too.

Even John Glenn's famous LLTV training flight c[r]ash has all the indications of being stage[d]...

Glenn never flew the LLTV.

Note the above photo was obtained from NASA archives...

Hogwash. The original photo prior to its having been doctored and downgraded by the Whiz Kids might have come from NASA, but the clumsy photoshop additions that "prove" the author's point certainly didn't.

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Clavius Moon Base

Agreed!! I went to the moonbloopers site, and the first thing I saw was this...

...Emphasis mine

Well, they got one thing right, the images are identical. What I've emphasized is totally wrong. The images on the right were certainly not taken on the Moon and Nasa doesn't claim that they were. This is not an ordinary lie...this is a stupid lie. I don't know how they could actually say something like that and expect it to be taken seriously. :roll:

...and the site goes on and on like that for page after page. When does it stop being shoddy research and start being a blatant lie? If an author writes that NASA claims a picture was taken on the moon, where is that author's responsibility to provide a source for that claim?

Charles T. Hawkins is simply, knowingly lying. I can honestly see no other defensible interpretation of what he has written.

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Clavius Moon Base

I agree. What I saw on the Web looked to be deliberate fabrication of evidence and outright lies. That's why I thought it was likely some children's prank. To discover there really is a book is almost shocking to me.

By the way, the link provided to the moonbloopers site at the beginning of this thread dosen't seem to be working. Please try this one ... http://whizkids2004.tripod.com/whizkidstv/

The "Moonbloopers" site has to be a gag -- right? I mean, those "animals" seen in odd-shaped, low-res shadows are hilarious. You supposedly have studio lights, dozens of technicians milling around, people shouting, and a cat is quietly curled up next to the rover, taking a nap. Surely these people don't expect us to take that stuff seriously.

So it went from yellow to black to blue to green. Why does it matter? Stargate uses green while the big movies like Lord of the Rings and The Matrix use blue.

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It matters because Hawkins' claims are anachronistic and simplistic.

First, "chromakey" (chrominance keying) is a television-only process. It is an electronic means of on-the-fly compositing. It cannot be used for film. Keying in television has been around for a very long time, but originally in luminance form. You can develop even analogue equipment that drops out signals below a certain threshold and replaces them with a background plate. These days chrominance keying is a fine art that does everything from the standard superimposition of the weatherman over his maps to the indication of first-down lines in televised football games.

So Hawkins' reference to "chromakey" is the first indication that he doesn't know what he's talking about. His "proof" photo clearly depicts motion picture film cameras, not television cameras. His "evidence" and his claims are mismatched.

Second, he specifically mentions blue and green screens. This is anachronistic, as someone in the mid to late 1960s wouldn't yet be using the blue-screen method and definitely not the green-screen method. The blue-screen method works because it corresponds to a primary element in the film, and also because it is the perfect complement to skin tones. This gives better reproduction of skin tones in the foreground elements, where the (missing) blue information is approximated by printing the green element on black-and-white film and then printing through a blue filter. The downfall of this method is the number of generations required, leading to a loss of contrast. Eastman developed the 5497 (I think that's the right number) emulsion as a high-contrast film for photo compositing. It was sold as consumer Kodak VR Gold film.

The advantage of the sodium screen process (e.g., Mary Poppins) was that the holdout matte was generated in the camera. Fewer generations in the process leads to preserving grades and contrast and a higher-quality picture. But this is done by using the old three-strip cameras (i.e., the first Technicolor cameras) and running a special emulsion on the third strip. The entire scene was evenly illuminated by bright sodium lights that emitted only in a very narrow spectrum. If you replace the filter on the third strip with a narrow-pass filter tuned to the sodium wavelength, and you film your actors against a white screen lit by that light, you get a crisp holdout matte on the third strip. The first strip is regular color film with the foreground against a white background.

So to composite, you print the background plate with the holdout matte generated from the sodium-sensitive stock. Then you rewind and print the foreground, which is self-matting. That's why the opticals in Mary Poppins hold up very well even 40 years later. You get no generation penalty over normal printing. The blue-screen matte-extraction process is extremely heinous.

Green is only useful for digital compositing, chosen because digital imaging systems are usually more sensitive in the green band and because green paint is more reflective. This has practical advantages for filming the foreground elements because you can get by with less and sloppier light on the screen. My compositing system allows me to choose any hue I want for the key color, but green works best.

Black-screen and white-screen compositing work on film if your foreground and background densities are such that rudimentary photochemical luminance keying will work. I.e., you create the mattes by overexposing or underexposing your foreground in the duplication process beyond the latitude of the print film. If I photograph you against a perfectly black screen, I can overexpose the dupes to my heart's content without ever getting anything from the background.

So I overexpose your face in order to get the silhouette, and that can be printed on reversal film to generate the burn-in and holdout mattes. This has the advantage of preserving all the chroma information, but has a disadvantage in that high contrast in the foreground may not be fully obliterated by overexposure, requiring garbage mattes and rotoscoping. So you can go to white-screen photography, where the background saturates the film and you can underexpose the foreground to get a natural holdout matte. Conversely, highlights are a problem in the foreground.

Douglas Trumbull made a limited use of this process in Kubrick's 2001, but preferred in-camera compositing. "Star Trek" the TV show also used black-screen compositing.

Blue-screening was available in 1969, but it was not widely used because of its complexity and generally low quality. It wasn't really used seriously until 1977 for Star Wars, and from then was widely used until the 1990s. Finally, the blue-screen process requires a particular wavelength of blue reflecting at a certain luminosity, so that the density in the blue layer of the film is carefully controlled. The colors in the photo are just wrong.

Hawkins apparently has no real knowledge of the techniques widely used in the 1960s for film compositing. He is attempting to project modern techniques and related (but inapplicable) technologies onto his theory. This has led him to fabricate the wrong kind of "evidence" for his theory. In other words, his photo and explanation show what would be done if the footage were faked in 1999, but is utterly wrong for a composite shot of 1969.

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

Yet again, Jay.... just in awe! =D>

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I meant why does the particular colour effect the compositing process. I wasn't actually talking about Hawkins. Thanks for explaining it.

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States that it is awaiting a copyright.