In this week's Parade suppliment to the Sunday newspaper, Marilyn vos Savant was asked if she knows of any way to refute a conspiracy believer.

__________________
I may have many faults, but being wrong ain't one of them. -- Jimmy Hoffa

I get "your evidence is supplied by NASA or the disinfo agents and therefore invalid", which is the same thing I suppose.

I have had a running battle with someone who is defending Una Ronald's "coke bottle" claims. I have shown that there is absolutly no corroborating evidence of any of this one woman's claims and I get "of course there is no evidence" (the "real" video has been suppresed, the letters to the editor removed from the Western Australian) !!!!!! Hmmm, difficult to continue against such logic.

__________________
"Man has always found it easier to sacrifice his life than learn the multiplication table." - Somerset Maugham

So where are the other people who saw the bottle? Where are the people who saved their own copies of the Western Australian before "they" got to them?

An excuse is not the same thing as an argument. "Maybe they destroyed the 'original' tape. Maybe they got rid of all the genuine copies of the paper." These are not arguments. They're excuses for why the facts and the conclusions don't match.

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

And what did they put in place of the letters? I've read the newspapers of the time. There aren't any white patches, and the letters there are relevant to issues of the time. I suppose it's possible the editors replaced these letters with other letters which would otherwise have been unpublished...

But then you get back to the old question of what happened to original copies of the newspapers which people would have kept. For example, I keep a copy of a newspaper from 1990, marking the success of my football team in a grand final (Collingwood). The Powers That Be are going to have to remember to break into my place and replace the copy if they ever want to change some inconvenient story/letter/advertisement in that paper...

Exactly, Peter. The notion that one can simply "change" after the fact a newspaper that was printed and distributed to tens of thousands of private citizens is ludicrous. The conspiracists cannot provide one single copy of the Western Australian that has any of the Una Ronald letters.

Make no mistake: David Percy and Mary Bennett didn't see any of the letters to confirm their existence or absence. The only source of the claim for the letters is "Una Ronald" herself, an anonymous source. She said the letters appeared there. That's normally a claim that can be easily verified. And so the absence of those letters doesn't really qualify as an argument from silence.

All we have is the uncorroborated, inconsistent claim of an anonymous woman. Nothing more.

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

Even if "they" somehow rounded up and changed every single copy of the newspapers in question, then there should still be readers who can say, "Yes, I remember those letters -- I read them." Are there any such people?

Only "Una Ronald".

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

...until/unless similarly-inclined folk step forward and claim to have seen them, solely for the purposes of corroborating "her" story. :roll:

__________________
"Earth diameter is 7,900 miles, and Moon diameter is 2,160 miles. It takes on average 90 minutes to complete one Earth orbit, so one Moon orbit should take roughly 25 minutes." - Sam "NasaScam" Colby

Bearer of the highly coveted "I found Venus in nine Apollo photos" sweatsocks.

DataCable^2008 A+

Is there any evidence that Una Ronald even exists?

__________________
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

Bennett and Percy's video shows the woman claiming to be "Una Ronald".

I favor the hypothesis that she exists, simply because Bennett and Percy so significantly depart from her statements in order to draw their own conclusion. If you're going to invent a witness, why invent someone whose story you have to change so much?

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

I wouldn't be surprised to see someone does appear who claims that they have evidence of the letter. Memories can change, and are particularly vulnerable to slight modifications over time. Someone steps forward and says "I don't have the original copy, but I remember my Dad reading it aloud at the dinner table." If two oridinary circumstances - a father reading newspaper letters to his children and a father expressing skepticism about the moon landings - are combined into one memory, you would have a very convincing "ear witness."

Whether something was published or not in a large newspaper is an objectively verifiable claim. Recollections etc. are irrelevant.

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

Absolutely. I agree completely.

Can a nyone tell me what this is about?

Una Ronald?

The "Western Australian" btw its The West Australian

Coke bottles?

Conspiracy theories?

I buy and read the west Australian every day, maybe I can help : p

__________________
<3

Well if you have copies from July 22nd - 29th, 1969.......

__________________
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

Look here and here for info. The first link gives you the background info, the second link gives a more plausible explanation for what might have been seen.

Thanks for the refs re: Una Ronald, pghnative-it's a story I wasn't fully familiar with either. But something which I don't think has been taken into account in debunking the Una Ronald story and which may help to give the lie to it (forgive me Jay, if I have missed this somewhere in your excellent account) is that, in 1969, many parts of Western Australia still didn't even have television!

Large portions of rural Western Australia did not receive television broadcasts until the 1970s. The ABC (national Australian broadcaster; Americans think PBS or BBC) did not even open its first channnel in Carnarvon (home of the NASA tracking station and OTC communication satellite ground station that broadcast the live Apollo 11 television to the southern regions aroudn Perth) until 1972!

In later versions of the story, it was claimed that Una lived in regional or rural Western Australia, not in Perth: therefore, we need to know where she was supposed to be living to determine if she could even have had acces to television to see the purported "coke bottle" footage.

Another thing to bear in mind is that Una claimed to have seen the broadcast "live" in the evening. Apart from the fact that it was 10:56am Western Australian time when Armstrong first stepped onto the lunar surface, even if we accept the hypothesis that she actually saw a replay that night and has confused it for the live broadcast, there could be a problem. The impression given seems to be that Una saw the broadcast late in the evening, but in those regional/rural areas that had television in 1969, many of the commercial stations shut down around 9.30-10.00pm (which can hardly be described as "late"!) Even the ABC rarely broadcast after 11pm.

Jobe, if you're in Western Australia (which it sounds like), perhaps you could verify this information by a check of local television guides of the period?

__________________
The meek shall inherit the Earth: the rest of us are going into Space!

Note in this thread here (at bottom of page 1), a BABBler consulted old copies of the West Australian and found no references to Una Ronald or her coke bottle.

...in 1969, many parts of Western Australia still didn't even have television!

I discuss this indirectly. Especially for the Apollo 11 broadcast some ad hoc steps were taken to provide live coverage to people who previously (and subsequently) did not receive any such broadcast.

In later versions of the story, it was claimed that Una lived in regional or rural Western Australia, not in Perth...

It was never claimed that she lived in Perth, only that she watched television broadcasts originating in Perth. That puts her in the Perth environs, but perhaps far enough away to be considered rural.

Una saw the broadcast alone in her house. This implies that she owned a television, which would be unreasonable if there were no broadcasts to watch. Therefore we conclude that Una lived in an area of the country that had received television broadcasts prior to Apollo 11 and thus likely subsequently to it.

The ad hoc provisions we speak of were not necessarily to provide television coverage to areas of the country that had previously had no television at all, but rather to provide live coverage of the moon landings to people who were not accustomed to live broadcasts.

Another thing to bear in mind is that Una claimed to have seen the broadcast "live" in the evening.

Yes, this was the first indication that we needed to examine her story more carefully.

Bennett and Percy -- who are the only people who know "Una Ronald's" true identity (that is not her real name), picked up quickly on the fact that the Apollo 11 EVA occurred in the Australian morning. They argued then that Una had to have seen a repeated, tape-delayed broadcast because she said she saw it at night, and because no live television was available in her area; she couldn't have seen it live.

The latter point is dismissed; steps were taken to provide a live broadcast but Bennett and Percy weren't aware of it.

The former point becomes problematic. Likely there were tape-delayed repeats, likely broadcast that evening and over subsequent days. We cannot therefore categorically reject the time in which Una says she saw the moon walk. It may indeed have been in the evening and on tape. The problem is that Una says she saw them live and in the evening, which is simply impossible. She is wrong on one of those points, and we do not have the information necessary to determine which is wrong.

But it makes a big difference in how we approach the rest of the story.

Una's version is this: she watched the moon walk live on television, alone, at night. She saw the object she claims was there, which she identified as an on-set "blooper". The next day she saw the repeat broadcast during the day, some 20-24 hours after the moon walk. Her object wasn't there, suggesting to her that it had been edited out between the "live" evening broadcast and the taped repeat. She goes on to suggest her story was corroborated by the West Australian in the form of letters from other people who had also seen the object and noted its absence in later versions.

Bennett and Percy's version is this: she watched the moon walk at night on a tape-delayed broadcast some 7-8 hours after it really happened, believing it was a live broadcast. In fact, someone had doctored the tape to insert a Coke bottle, which was visible only to those who saw that particular tape -- probably broadcast from Perth. Of course someone noticed it and arranged for a clean tape to be used for the broadcast the next day.

In addition there is a popularly recounted version: she saw the broadcast live in western Australia that night, and because of her proximity to the receiving station she was seeing a version that was not being edited or controlled by NASA in any way. She saw the blooper live, but it was edited out of subsequent tapes.

The latter seems to take the best elements of both versions, but of course makes no sense given the facts.

Bennett and Percy have to change Una's story. She believes she saw a live blooper. The authors argue that it was something inserted by a mischevious whistle-blowing technician on a taped copy. Their story is more in line with the facts as they understood them. But because they had to change her story in order to make it fit the facts, they removed its value as proof of a hoax. If the Coke bottle was added by some wag in Perth, then it has no bearing on the authenticity of the original material. Doctoring the record of true event does not mean the event did not take place.

Una's version story is simply implausible. It has too many holes and no corroboration, and gives evidence of having been embellished by conspiracy theories that wouldn't arise for five years after this experience.

Jobe, if you're in Western Australia (which it sounds like), perhaps you could verify this information by a check of local television guides of the period?

That would be an excellent bit of information to have.

I've already had people living in Australia check their back copies of the West Australian for what Una says is there. No luck finding any of it. I also contacted the archivist for the paper and had her do the same research. This wasn't necessarily to confirm that the paper carried it. Bennett and Percy argue that when they tried to verify this point with the paper, the paper ignored their several attempts to contact them. I just wanted to point out that I had no trouble getting cooperation from the paper on this point and they were not in the least reluctant to talk about it.

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

My favorite excuse for no evidence to back up a claim was when Graham Hancock (sp?) would answer questions about the lack of evidence for his Lost Civilization by claiming that all the evidence was destroyed in the Great Flood...QED. Invoking one mystery to solve another never seems to loose its appeal to these people.

__________________
"You're not going crazy, you're going sane in a crazy world!" - The Tick