Been making a little progress myself...


Just sit right back and you'll hear a tale
about the Apollo trip
A tale of lies and conspiracy,
by folk who've lost their grip.

They claim that Armstrong ne'er set foot
apon the lunar soil,
they claim the whole darn space program
is government snake oil.

They claim the justice of their fight;
"The truth shall out at last"
but sales of books and videos
shows motives far more crass

What basis do they have for such
remarkable belief?
Photographs that don't look like
what they expect to see.

...

They claim the ascent engine should
have made a mighty sound,
belched forth yards of yellow flame
dug a great pit in the ground.


and so on for stanza after stanza. Think I could make it through Sibrel's top ten?

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"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

Since this is wonderful but completely off topic, I'm thinking of starting a new thread for creative efforts like these. (I'm working on an adaptation of a Shakespeare sonnet myself!)

Where should I post the new thread? Here in Lunar Conspiracies or in BABBling?

There is an old thread with astronomy in poems and songs somewhere on this board. I think you can find it if you search for threads with Song in the title.

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Now while I might be amused by Cthulhians, I don't necessarily distrust them to carry out the functions of government. -- JayUtah

What's it like being a skeptic in the Middle East? Check out my blog.

I found an old thread of limericks about Planet X, but I couldn't find the one you're referring to. Maybe I'm not very good at using the search function. Anyway, if it's really old, I'd rather start a new thread than reanimate a mouldered one.

Am I too late to say, "Start a new thread"? Besides, these are parodies, not limericks or "songs with astronomy in them".

I was thinking about this last night, and I realized that even in the literature world, there's a hoax theory--and one that's lasted hundreds of years, at that.

I speak of nothing other than the idea that Shakespeare didn't write the plays of Shakespeare. my favorite candidates have always been the ones that died before all of the plays were produced for the first time. decades before, in some cases.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

For the astronomy (and physics-related) poesy, here's a couple from memory. I think I read them in Analog;

Higgledy-piggedly, Arnold Q. Penzias
hung up the phone and then ordered a trace.
"Robert," he whispered, "we just got a call from a
semi-detectable breather from space."

There once was a young lady named Bright,
who travelled much faster than light.
She set out one day, in a relative way,
and returned on the previous night.

There once was a fencer named Fisk,
his lunges exceedingly brisk;
from the speed of his action, the Fitz-Gerald Contraction
diminished his foil to a disk.

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"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

That's what I proposed just a couple of posts ago! But I wanted some opinions on where I should put that thread. If we take the forum descriptions seriously, then this is the ONLY forum in which parodies dealing with the Apollo hoax theory could be posted. On the other hand, some of the stuff people have come up with isn't about the Apollo theories, so maybe the new thread should go in BABBling.

Maybe there's not enough interest in this to justify a separate thread, anyway. But here's my contribution, with apologies to William Shakespeare:

Shall I compare space to a summer's day?
It suits my profit-making purposes!
Rough winds do shake the flag of USA,
And faint light falls on shadowed surfaces.
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
and astronauts should saute in their suits;
A lack of stars, and other cryptic signs,
I claim (although the evidence refutes).
No, my eternal theories shall not fade
Nor lose possession of their paranoia;
Nor shall man's triumphs cease to be portrayed
As grim and shocking as a print by Goya:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long live lies, and lies I'll sell to thee!

Edited for meter.

A mathematician confided,
the Mobius strip is one-sided.
You'll get quite a laugh,
if you cut one in half.
It stays in one piece when divided.

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Any day you wake up on "the right side of the dirt" is a good day.

T. Anderson

I did the search as I described above and got over 600 hits so I could see why you'd have problems. Anyway I refined my search and found the thread I was talking about here.

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Now while I might be amused by Cthulhians, I don't necessarily distrust them to carry out the functions of government. -- JayUtah

What's it like being a skeptic in the Middle East? Check out my blog.

The most significant reason for the seeming prevalence of Apollo hoax material, relative to similar claims about NOAA and the Air Force, is that Apollo just has not been in the news so much lately for anything else.
The Air Force and NOAA are going concerns, with new input into the data pool every day.
Apollo is an episode from history, the hoax claim is a relatively recent addition, at least in terms of high-profile publicity, and has a greater chance of dominating current discussion of the subject.
Legitimate new data does surface about Apollo, but this is not as likely to outweigh conspiracist material as would similar data dealing with a current event.

And with apologies to every poet who ever finely crafted verse in this language:

Not one shred of evidence do I produce,
The lurkers support me in email.
The uninformed here, I would gladly seduce,
The lurkers support me in email.

Conspiracies dire, the data require,
even if I draw the scientists' ire.

Apollo? The Big Bang? They all draw my fire!
And the lurkers support me in email.



(I thought about making this of epic length, but forces of sanity and goodness prevailed).

One more reason I should just change my handle to "Threadslayer"...

A little contribution. (ahem)


The PANs to his outpourings surely must yield
For his reasons are plain common sense.
They cannot have passed through that solid heat shield
Which proves it was all a pretence!

The Van Allen Belts filled with horrible rays
That would hard boil an egg in a flash
Showed to NASA the futile error of ways
“Let’s just hoax it and pocket the cash!”

“Let’s con the technicians and Russians as well
And geologists from far and from near.”
But they didn’t allow for that genius Sibrel
Or that crafty, self-taught engineer.

So beware you if hoaxes you wish to promote
With your masses, O2 use, vees-delta
You can fool the egg-heads & folk of that yoke
But not He of Nevada’s cat shelter.

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"I'd take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day." - Douglas Adams

That stanza there is the funniest thing I've seen all day. Thank you.

=D>

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Dave

Anyone seen my marbles? Anyone ... ?

=D> =D> =D>

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Living on Earth may be expensive, but it includes an annual free trip around the Sun.

And my little contribution.... but it's a seperate limerick...

If they passed through the Van Allen Belt
It's said the astronauts would melt
But they found as they hurried
They needn't have worried
As the effects were hardly felt



(Hmmm.... maybe needs some work.... suggestions??)

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The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not Eureka! (I found it!) but rather, 'hmm.... that's funny...'
- Isaac Asimov

Are we alone in the Universe? Are we the only intelligent life? Who knows? But the universe is so BIG, it somehow seems such a waste of space if we are ....

There was a young fella named Sibrel
Who made claims many found unbelievbrel
One day he insulted a spaceman of yore,
who punched him straight down to the floor

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Living on Earth may be expensive, but it includes an annual free trip around the Sun.

Ahem... to return to the original topic...

I think Nomuse was not asking about conspiracy theories in general (of which there are legion), but more specifically about theories which deny the reality of particular inventions or voyages of discovery. To repeat:

Are there any conspiracy theorists that claim Amundsen never reached South Pole?

Or that Voyager probes are a hoax?

Or that Columbus knew about America before he set off?

Or that Marco Polo never existed?

Etc.

As far as inventions are concerned, I know there is a nutball in Netherlands who claims all supersonic flight is a hoax -- Apollo, all spacecraft, and all supersonic planes and rockets.

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Fiction has to be plausible. Reality is under no such constraint.