But since he doesn't fly shuttle missions, they can't bump him off
Previous post - bold mine:
I rest my case...

I have a depth of patients to be proud of. BUT this is getting to the end of it.
Just how anyone could seriously question this Apollo program is ignorance to be ashamed of. Go do the work. Look for and find information irrefutable.
It has all been said a dozen times in just this thread.... Shame on you idiots. and No. Thats not being hard. It must surly be true.
To stand in the forest and say 'I can not see the timber for the tree's'
What started as a well meaning discussion has quickly been dragged down by a fool.

If the skepticism you are implying is that man never went to the moon then I can't help do anything but laugh. Evidence = moon rocks, undoctored photographs, no one from the inside has come out and said anything by now, Soviets have photographed our landers from their moon satellites, etc. You are better off defending Roger Clemens never did steroids.

I was thinking he meant HB's are skeptics. But I stand by what I said. One cannot be said to be "Skeptical" of something about which there is so much evidence. The only way to be an HB is to turn a blind eye to the evidence. Skeptics Don't Do That.

Brad_Smith made a similar claim in the CT forum- that folks are "skeptical" of the claims of the government about UFO's.

He got the same speech from me. Do not confuse skepticism with willing blindness.

I strongly advise that you disabuse yourself of the notion that any of us are going on the assumption that it's true because the history books say so.

As to what evidence we have, the rocks; the photos; the film; the TV; the documentation; the surviving hardware; the personal testimonies; the construction of facilities, many of which are still used today; the verification of aspects such as by subsequent missions and independent flights; the lack of any confession of fakery from any verified participant; the conspicuous lack of accusations of fakery from actual qualified physicists/geologists/engineers/etc.; and so on. I've spent eight years looking at this stuff, and I know I still have barely scratched the surface of what's available.

Questioning is fine. Drawing conclusions without rational process is not. An awful lot of people are sceptical about the Moon landings for irrational reasons, as becomes very clear when they are asked to explain what led them to their conclusions. Their inability to do so speaks volumes.

__________________
"The very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common: They don't alter their views to fit the facts, they alter the facts to fit their views." The Doctor, Doctor Who: The Face of Evil.

Another issue to bear in mind that to be skeptical of the landing is to be gullible of the hoax explanation. So it simply isn't logical to claim that HBs are more skeptical than the rest of us-- they are far less so. If one wishes to take skepticism to an absurd extreme, one can certainly say "I don't find the evidence convincing that we landed on the Moon", but that does not lead to the belief that it was a hoax, it leads to complete uncertainty on the whole subject.

For example, I can say: "although members of my family claim to have gone to Australia, and many different media outlets report on the existence of Australia, including history books, I myself have never been there. Thus I don't find the evidence to be compelling that Australia really exists. Of course, if it doesn't exist, there must be a massive conspiracy in place to create that illusion, but I find no compelling evidence of that either. I am simply uncertain about the existence of Australia." Now, there is nothing incorrect or logically inconsistent in that position, for it is entirely my choice what evidence I need to find something compelling. But to be consistent I do need to apply the same thinking to everything-- not just Australia, or not just the Moon landing, but even to my knowledge of my own name.

There are many possible explanations (probably some are already given) and with the limited information we have it's hard to make exact distinctions.

If I had to I would group them (probably incomplete and somewhat overlapping) as

1. Fake Believers
a) make their claims to sell their books, videos etc or
b) have an axe to grind with the US (or its government)
c) simple trolls

2. Casual Believers, have been persuaded by the fraudulent works of group 1, and lack the knowledge and initiative to research the matter properly.
Those are the ones that we hope to convince of the truth in the CT-Forum

3. Real Believers
a) think the US is evil and therefor incapable to land on the moon
b) think the US is evil and has to lie on everything
c) (again) have an axe to grind and believe their own story
d) simply incapable to understand the physics involved
e) who want to believe the story because they can feel as if they are part of an elite group who knows THE TRUTH

Obviously some HBs could fit into more than one group, i.e. Kaysing could be 1a,1b od 3c

I have become convinced that nothing in heaven or earth could convince a moon hoax believer. If you turned a telescope to the moon and showed them the footprints, they'd say they were put their by unmanned probes.

If you took them to the moon and slammed their face into the lunar soil around tranquility base, they'd still say it was an elaborate, feindishly clever movie set.

__________________
Olsen the moderator.

"I dunno How he did it! But, by gum! He did it!"

Yes, your groups make a lot of sense. I would add to your 3e that their desire to be in the know exceeds their desire to be in the know.

I have often wondered when we will be able to see the physical proof directly
(abandoned moon rovers, etc.)

Some of the biggest telescopes must come pretty close in resolution already, don't they?
(once we get there, that should convince most of the 'group 2: casual believers')

Unfortunately, no. The "diffraction limit" of a telescope says roughly that if you want to resolve something that is 1 meter in size, like a feature on a lander, at a distance of 400 million meters, you form the ratio 400,000,000/1 and multiply that by the wavelength of light you are using, say 0.0000005 meters. You get that you need a telescope with a diameter of about 200 meters, and it has to be in space so you don't get blurring by the atmosphere, and it has to operate at the diffraction limit. We're just not there yet. Even a telescope in orbit around the Moon would need to be about 8 meters across, so we couldn't even see it if the Hubble space telescope orbited the Moon. But maybe space-based interferometers will achieve the needed resolution-- but it wouldn't convince the HBs anyway.

Not the hardcore one's, you're right
They would say the telescope is a hoax, too
Thanks for the numbers!

By the way, there is another thread about CT's going on here

Point taken-- you were talking more about the causal HBs who still have some contact with rational thought. There's still hope for them!

I'm no doctor and I have absolutely zero qualifications to make such assumptions. But It's this type of true "believer" that I feel, if mentally examined, would show a diagnosable illness. Obviously not all of them and to varying degrees but still.

This reminds me of something I read about back in 1988. A Soviet general (Russia was still Soviet Union back then, for all you young whippersnappers ) on a visit to Smithsonian stood before Apollo display and said in a wondering tone "So they really did land!"

After his hosts' jaws separated from the floor, the general explained as follows: "We knew they reached the Moon. We tracked every flight on radar, not just followed telemetry. But LEM's were too small for our radars at that distance, so I always thought every mission just stayed in lunar orbit for several days each time. Even though Soviet government accepted the landings as real*, I never really believed it until today."

My guess is that Comrade General's nineteen years of disbelief was based on the fact that launching from lunar surface and matching trajectories with an orbiter in one shot is indeed hard -- harder than landing alone, and MUCH harder than just entering lunar orbit. Without pre-positioned tracking stations on the Moon, it was very likely beyond Soviet technology of late 60's and early 70's. Comrade General simply did not want to believe that Americans were that far ahead in target tracking -- a very obvious military advantage.

Of course, his higher-ups in Politbureau did believe -- and who knows, maybe if and when they were considering extending Soviet Empire to Western Europe, those six unerring rendezvous between LEM's and Apollo orbiters weighed on the "con" side.

*And did its best to minimize their importance

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

those six unerring rendezvous between LEM's and Apollo orbiters weighed on the "con" side.

Seven. Don't forget Apollo 10. It didn't land but the LM did separate from the CM/SM and descended to about 10 miles above the lunar surface. They had to successfully rendezvous and dock to get home.

Come on guys... we are wasting our time writing and reading this.... using up valuable real estate in cyberspace.

The OP is dead right... we will never understand how facts don't seem to shed light on a topic for some folk. Waste of time trying.

The hoax believers will believe no matter what you say. Ockhams razor means nothing to them. I cant help laughing when I see the face of one of these 'sceptics' when I ask them:

"If the CIA (an organisation whose very existence is dedicated to keeping secrets) is unable to keep anything secret for long... How do you explain thousands of NASA geeks keeping a secret for the government all their lives?"

After his hosts' jaws separated from the floor, the general explained as follows: "We knew they reached the Moon. We tracked every flight on radar, not just followed telemetry. But LEM's were too small for our radars at that distance, so I always thought every mission just stayed in lunar orbit for several days each time. Even though Soviet government accepted the landings as real*, I never really believed it until today."

While those old Soviet radars might have had a problem tracking a LM in lunar orbit or on the surface, their equivalent of the Deep Space Network shouldn't have had any problem picking up the LMs transmissions from the lunar surface. Those would've been stationary (with respect to the surface), meaning the LMs had to have landed (no Doppler shift, no loss of signal from going behind the moon).

Actually, I think those of us who have spent years dealing with CTs and HBs understand them pretty well. It takes us a while to determine which motive each individual person has, but once we've worked that out, it helps us decide how to handle the situation. Knowledge is never a waste.

__________________
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!"

Yes.

Is there any imaginable solid evidence/proof you would accept?

__________________
Olsen the moderator.

That's exactly why I brought this up. Obviously, this particular general had a mild case of HB-ism. In his case, it was curable.

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

The old Soviet Union had a lot of generals. Giving him the benefit of the doubt, it's possible this particular one was ignorant about space matters. Like the old American humorist Will Rogers noted decades ago, "Everybody is ignorant. Only on different subjects." For all we know, this general could've been an army officer with no space background. Or he could've been an HB idiot. There's no way to tell.

Well, he wasn't an idiot. He followed the facts, he saw the facts, he changed his mind. That is not an idiot.

__________________

Wow. There's a lot of fallacious assumptions and ignorance here. Not what I expect from a science board.


Good source, if they aren't lying.

Could have been faked.

Could have been faked as well. They number doesn't matter only a matter of complexity.

True, there are Moon rocks, but it is not 100% certain that they came from men on the moon.

Good, however, just proves a capsule went to the Moon.

Just, perhaps, proves a spacecraft when to Lunar orbit.

LRRR, asolute proof man has put an object on the Moon.

Again, proof of transmissions from the Moon, not that men were walking on it.

Proof of an space launch, not that men walked on the moon.

Proof of a space flight. Not of a lunar landing.

__________________
All moderations in purple.

You ain't nobody 'til you've been banned.

Excuse me, but hogwash like that belongs in CT.

Some people are capable in believing 10 impossible things before breakfast, but there is no need to inflict it on an unsuspecting audience.

__________________
Join the Illuminati

But it brings up hard, self-contained proof that Apollo happened as stated. It all comes down to the radio telescopes. The LM stayed in near-continuous contact while on the surface and didn't move. The CSM moved and was occluded for a very predictable not-quite half of every lunar orbit. And during TLI and TEI, the CSM moved along its flight path.

Amateur astronomers all over the world with radio telescopes tracked the mission every step of the way.

The CSM, LM, S-IVB and the jettisoned panels that protected the LM were all visually tracked and even photographed by amateur astrophotographers.

Add the rest of the evidence (lack of evidence of moisture in the rocks and regolith for example), and it becomes literally impossible for Apollo to have happened in any way other than exactly as presented.

The evidence is so overwhelmingly firm that I can't tell you with that much certainty what I had for lunch today.

Speaking, did this thread get moved to OTB from somewhere else? Why here, exactly? Discussion, even meta-discussion regarding the Apollo hoax clearly best-fits in CT, even if the OP isn't defending one of the (many) pro-hoax positions. Could this be evidence of the real conspiracy?

__________________
And you, to whom adversity has dealt the final blow
With smiling [faces] lyin' to ye' everywhere ye' go
Turn to, and put out all your strength of arm and heart and brain
And like the Mary Ellen Carter, rise again.

... Speaking of fallacies. How about Argument from Incredulity mixed in even proportions with Argument from Ingorance. That you don't understand geology, and can't (seemingly) believe that others do understand it, says nothing about reality. Only about your own lack of knowledge of geology.

There have been many threads here on BAUT about the evidence that clearly shows that the 800+ pounds of rocks, regolith, and core samples from the lunar surface never exhibited the sort of erosion and/or features due to exposure to air or moisture over a geologically long period of time.

In layperson's terms, those rocks were created in an airless, waterless environment, they altered (due to vibration, pressure, and/or impact) in an airless, waterless environment, and have been in vacuum long before our species learned to walk on its hind legs.

The person who can figure out how to fake this sort of thing is guaranteed a Nobel prize of some sort, because it'll overthrow just about everything science knows about geology.

Speaking, the weight of return-samples for all robotic missions combined, all countries, all missions, all destinations, over five decades of spaceflight can best be measured in grams. Apollo returned over a quarter (US) ton of samples. Core samples, regolith, volcanic sand (17), loose fist-sized rocks of many sizes and types, as well as fracture samples they explicitly broke off of nearby boulders. No robot can do all of that in only five missions.

What you're suggesting simply isn't possible.

__________________
And you, to whom adversity has dealt the final blow
With smiling [faces] lyin' to ye' everywhere ye' go
Turn to, and put out all your strength of arm and heart and brain
And like the Mary Ellen Carter, rise again.

You also have to realise how deep the indoctrination and culture of distrust went with the old guard. That General probably reached his elevated position by dogged and unwavering adherence to 'the party line', in which the U.S was seen as propagandists. I remember a Soviet pilot who defected to the West (can't remember his name). After his defection, he was taken out on the town in New York and he found it difficult to believe that the things he was shown were available to all. He thought it was all staged until he'd seen so much that he realised it had to be real.

__________________
This is not an idea to be tossed aside lightly - it should be thrown with great force

So what do you expect from science board? Blind acceptance of idiotic suggestions such as those you submit? Because if you truly believe that you are making a valid point, at best you are extremely ignorant of the facts and at worst what can only be described as a woo-woo.

__________________
This is not an idea to be tossed aside lightly - it should be thrown with great force