Posted yesterday in Rense.

http://www.rense.com/general79/apol11.htm

What do you think?

I see nothing really unusual at first sight, but i hope that you here in BAT could provide a professional debunking of this. What about the "different ladders" acussation?

Sorry for my english.

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"The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination." - Albert Einstein

http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/au..._einstein.html

That's the first sign of trouble.

1) The shock absorbers. Simply, shiny material at different angles, exposures (and possibly cameras).
2) The ladder. Again; camera differences. But; More importantly, why would there have been 2 completely different sets with two different LMs?

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Numbers are not case sensitive. (me)

How many times do we have to tell you Neo, Nasa is smart enough to pull off such a wide-spread million-person conspiracy, but they missed all the small obvious stuff. Duh!

It's the whole theme of War of the Worlds; no matter how advanced and all-powerfull, even the smallest thing can bring it down. It gives the Nasa conspiracy a dramatic human angle, and makes it all the more interesting. Unfortunately, like the H.G. Wells novel, it's all fiction.

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I'm like one of those idiot savants...well, except for the savant part.

"A long time ago, yet somehow in the future"

Okay, I'll spend 30 seconds and take a quick look....

Yes, it does look odd to me. Too bad the two images are from two different missions, Apollo 11 and Apollo 15.

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The views expressed are the febrile product of an overactive imagination of a person who in shadows sees the gyrating Elvis-like ghost of Leonid Brezhnev.

Ummm. First pic is from A11, I found it on the ASJ site. (A-11 pic 5927) The second photo that shows the full lander with the different type of foil is listed as http://history.nasa.gov/alsj/a15/AS15-87-11839.jpg
I bolded the bit that struck me as odd. Now... why might the foil look different?

For what it's worth, on the high res pic it's pretty obvious that the gold foil is under the black covering. Sort of makes it seem like maybe the black covering may have been removed at some point between the two pictures (1 and 3).

I'm not sure what he's got marked as the thicker ladder from the video feed, but you can see the thinner ladder sides and rung about head high in the image.


ETA, blast. Spent too long playing with the links.

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I'm not gullible because I'm a Leo.--Actually said to me by a co-worker
Never trust anyone with 'The' for a middle name. --Said to me by a guy in Denny's at 4 am.
The difference between planning and pessimism can only be seen in retrospect. -- One of mine
Truth ain't like puppies; a bunch of them running around and you get to pick the one you like best." -- Emerson on Pushing Daisies

Well, it's not what he refers to as a "smoking gun", but I can answer the question he raises about the distance from the ladder to the pad.

The landing legs of the LM descent stage were not shock absorbers in the usual sense. They utilized a crushable matrix material as a one-time shock damper, but since they only needed to work once, they were designed to crush and stay crushed, not bounce back to their original length. This saved a lot of weight.

Because of this design, the pilots were supposed to shut down the descent engine when the contact probes touched the surface and allow the LM to drop the remaining six feet or so. This would produce the right amount of compression in the legs. However, on A11 and several other landings, the pilots chose to "fly it down" to the surface instead, resulting in less compression than expected. That left the ladder somewhat higher above the pad than the optimum, but well within the design limits.

Getting down wasn't really a problem. All the astronaut had to do was push back a bit and guide himself down using his hands on the ladder stringers. The only real issue was getting back up.

Neil's very first act, even before he stepped off the pad, was to try jumping back up onto the ladder to make sure it was feasible. Presumably if he couldn't make it, Buzz would not have descended to the surface, but would have stayed up on the ladder to give Neil a hand getting back aboard.

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Bring back Firefly!

"It is quite clear that Occam's razor does not sharpen in your pyramid." (Nicolas)

"Still, a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest." (Paul Simon)

Nothing to worry about:
#1 the LEMs look different because they were photographed on different missions.
#2 quote"NO explanation was ever given by NASA for this silly ladder design requiring astronauts to make a blind, backward jump down to the surface." NO explanation necessary because the astronaut didn't have to make a blind, backward jump as he jumped down onto the landing pad which was well known.
#3 he's mistaking the ladderstringer with something else. I don't know what it is but Neil's hand clearly is closed around a thin and frail stringer. Moreover, even a suspicious ladder doesn't explain how all the other phenomena apparent in a low gravity evvironment (falcon feather experiment, dust parabolas, golf ball flight, rover "dancing" etc) have been faked.
They haven't that's it

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Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic - Arthur C. Clarke

To my eyes the left side of the ladder (as seen in the shot taken from the right) matches the left side as seen in the (low res blurry sometimes ghosted T.V. image).

That is, the left and right sides of the ladder are different, but that's what is being compared.

(This pic shows the extra material well: http://www.apollo-projekt.de/images/AS11-40-5867.jpg)

Attached Images

lmladder.JPG (23.2 KB, 31 views)

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Measure once. Cut twice. Power tools are fun.

This is from the comments area on the rense page:

'Based on the Apollo 11 smoking gun article...I would have to conclude that Ted is a moron. His 'smoking gun' is that the live broadcast of Apollo 11 shows a ladder that does not match the still pictures. Look again, as it only takes about 3 seconds to realize the ladders do match. The still picture labeled Figure 3 shows that there is a support mounted to the left side of the ladder that matches the beefed up frame visible in the live video broadcast.*OH yeah,* and it doesn't really help when the author*includes pictures of Apollo 15*in an article about Apollo 11... there*is no way of knowing what the*engineers might have changed between*Apollo 11 and Apollo 15,*
so how can you use those pictures as evidence? "

How indeed?

tbm

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Paddle faster!! I hear banjo music!!

Not to mention that guns haven't smoked in about 140 years or more. (Ask Oliver Stone; Gods know he tried hard enough to find one that would.)

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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!"

Hahaha! You guys are never gonna believe what Ted's mystery "stringer" is. I looked it up in my copy of Virtual LM.

That supposed anomaly is... the flag holder.

That's right, our friend Ted's smoking gun is the tube that held the good old Stars and Stripes on its journey to the Mare Tranquilitatis. Maybe somebody should go back to Rense and question his patriotism!

*goes back to giggling uncontrollably*

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Bring back Firefly!

"It is quite clear that Occam's razor does not sharpen in your pyramid." (Nicolas)

"Still, a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest." (Paul Simon)

I think maybe I'll send Ted an e-mail with a link to this thread.

tbm

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Paddle faster!! I hear banjo music!!

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Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by ignorance or stupidity.
Isaac Asimov

"Note shock absorber (RED arrow) "

That website is clearly a fake - the arrows are pink, not red. The truth is out.

Doug

But; he already closed the case...

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Numbers are not case sensitive. (me)

I conversed with Ted briefly via e-mail last week. I introduced myself as the Clavius webmaster, whereupon he promptly made the standard complaint that I was trying to discredit what I couldn't explain or deal with.

I brought up first the fact that The Viral Factory admitted to making his "outtake" film and explained how they did it. He argued in response that the appearance of the outtake film was too similar (e.g., terrain) to authentic Apollo footage to be so easily dismissed. In other words, he completely side-stepped the evidence I presented, even when I posted links to the archived whistle-blowing web page and the current contact information for the company.

In the same message he brought up again the "stringer" argument. I pointed out, as had others, that he was trying to compare one side of the ladder to the other, and that the feature in question had been conclusively identified as the carrier for the flag assembly, not a structural element. I also emphasized that LM-2 and LM-5 are not expected to be identical, as he wrongly supposed, and that contrary to popular belief there were three design evolutions to the LM and countless individual modifications that means you can compare LM items only after having done copious homework.

In his second message he completely ignored that statement and instead changed the subject again. He handwaved about an alleged communication blackout that "isn't on the internet," and pointed me to some backwater paranormal-themed podcast for which he had been interviewed, as evidence. (I went to podcast's website but did not see his interview in their archives.)

When I asked him for closure on my previous two points, he stopped answering.

In my opinion it's likely Ted Twietmeyer knows that he can't stand up against reasoned criticism and that he's simply not going to let the facts stand in the way of a good story and his 15 minutes of fame in telling it.

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

So, the guy in the OP makes up a piece of a conspiracy out of whole cloth and uses footage from two entirely different missions to present his case??

Sweet mother of Rayquaza, do the folks at Rense really think their audience is that gullible? This little stunt must've destroyed what few shreds of credibility they ever had.

Next time, guys, try a little harder.

- Maha "moonshine" Vailo

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When you get down to it, Science answers how. Religion answers why. - hippietrekx

There is always the (even more disheartening) alternative explanation... the "folks at Rense" didn't notice the discrepancy and actually believe what they posted is true and non-contradictory.

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Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by ignorance or stupidity.
Isaac Asimov

And the even more, more disheartening realization that a markable percentabe of people are that gullible, or just don't care enough to do any investigating and so they believe these types of claims.

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I'm like one of those idiot savants...well, except for the savant part.

"A long time ago, yet somehow in the future"