To show how secret Vandenberg launches are, I spent about 30 seconds googling up pictures of launches taken by people outside of the base. I've linked some below:

From the Inyokern Airport (scroll down)
From the Goleta Air and Space Museum (they sell calenders with collections of photos of Vandenberg launches)
An e-mail alert system about pending launches

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One Earth, One Sky - IYA 2009
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Swift: Calendars! *wipes tears of silent laughter* I love it.

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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.

Obiviously the Moon is made of Cheese, and to conduct any sizable missions would require that the Astronuats wouldn't fall into the fondue during heated daylight hours.

Darkside yes. Dayside, no.

It seems Ral thinks that the Moon missions happened pretty much as we know them to have apart from having people along.

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Plebians

The lot of you.

Personal attacks, for shame on you all.

Feel free to identify any personal attack I have made on you. Otherwise, I will disregard this as diversionary.

Scepticism is not fallacious.

There is a difference between skepticism and unfounded denial. Your arguments to date have been nothing more than the latter - variations on "they could have faked that", with evidence-free appeals to secret programs.

[me:] If you wish to appeal to the notion of some set of secret launches, it is up to you to provide evidence for such launches - and the entire separate space program that supported them.
Vandenberg.

This, to put it gently, is incompatible with reality.

First, this is not evidence. It's simply naming a launch site. I might as well support my claim that aliens built the pyramids* by saying "Giza!" I repeat: it is up to you to provide evidence for such launches - and the entire separate space program that supported them.

Second, launches from Vandenberg are quite noticeable to surrounding populace. The attached plot shows the visibility for a typical twilight/night Delta II launch from VAFB. We can take this as representative for our purposes. Daylight launches are a bit less noticeable, but still visible to an enormous number of people. So much for secrecy.

Third, launches to the Moon must travel eastward. Your super-secret launch campaign would overfly the continental U.S.! Clearly you have not given any thought to this.

I have no such burden.

Of course you do. The testimony of the Apollo astronauts, not to mention that of the engineers and scientists who sent them there and returned them safely, and have examined the data and samples from their missions, is part of the historical and technical record. You can't simply say "they could be lying", on the basis of nothing more than your say-so, and expect any informed person to take you seriously. Particularly since their testimony is supported by the physical record, not to mention the engineering and scientific legacy of Apollo.

My mere ability at determining whether or not a person is lying, does not prove conclusively that a person is or is not in fact lying. Likewise, I can simply tell you that if you wish to prove me otherwise, then you have the burden. ad infinitum

There is no reason to believe you indeed have any reliable ability to determine whether someone is lying or not, so your premise is unsupported. Moreover, I have direct personal experience working with Apollo-era astronauts and engineers, and on the basis of such experience find your allegations unlikely in the extreme.

In any case, if you wish to dispute the record, it is up to you to provide some substance to your dispute. Otherwise, such allegations of lying are simply unsupported and can be disregarded.

I am not defending the MHCT at all.

Whether or not you are simply indulging in a rhetorical exercise, or actually promulgating "hoax" claims, your need to support your arguments.

No.

If you're not trolling, then surely you are eager to begin supporting some of your claims. I for one look forward to your specific arguments.

I believe most of the Saturn V fell back to Earth after it was ejected, being out of fuel.

The first and second stages did indeed fall back, as planned, into the Atlantic after staging. But not the entire launch vehicle. The S-IVB third stage placed the Apollo "stack" into the translunar coast, then separated. S-IVBs were tracked and controlled after this point, though, and some were deliberately guided to impact on the Moon. They were tracked to the Moon, as were the CSM, and the LM, which was also tracked on the Moon. Moreover, signals from the ALSEP experiment packages, which had to be set up, fueled, and activated by hand, were received from the Moon for years after the last Apollo flight.

*No, I don't believe aliens built the Pyramids.

Attached Thumbnails

 

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"Slapping a guy on the head is just as funny now as it was eighty years ago."

I met a moon landing denier once. Great guy. He was Russian, so I think he had entirely different reasons for denying than most of your standerd conspiricy buffs.

To put it another way RalofTyr, I have said in another thread that I am a student (you're under no requirement to beleive that if you so wish but bear with me) that would imply that I have met the requirements for my course so lets say someone decides to do an audit on me and check I didn't bluff my way in, I can show them the certificates for my qualifications, those could have been faked so I could get in touch with the issuing bodies and ask for their confirmation that I was awarded those qualifications ah but their records could have been falsified so we can check server logs and access details plus whatever other backup paper records they keep to confirm that the records were entered under proper circumstances, we can check ways that the data could have been falsified and discard them as appropriate. We can check that I did actually sit the exams by speaking with the invigilators and checking the paper trail that I was identified in the exam halls and so on, however if after all that they still insist that it could all be faked then it starts to stretch credibility a bit and asking that I prove that the whole lot wasn't faked when there is no reason to believe it was but reasons to believe the records genuine (watermarks in the certificates and so forth) then claiming that the whole lot was faked is a bit implausable. Now by analogy you can replace me with apollo missions and note that there is even more evidence for that than that I met the entry requirements for my course.

I agree. Usually fabricated evidence, ignorance or misunderstandings.

Thank you for refreshing my memory!
I guess the modern version of solipsism would be stating that we all live in a highly-sophisticated metaverse (like Second Life or World of Warcraft

Nope. As Moose pointed out: the frame of reference in this case is the respective observer. That's why it's so difficult to disprove.

----
I'm not going to defend this point of view,
because I don't believe in it (neither in solipsism nor apollo hoax)

My point was more that it's nothing new nor outrageous,
that the remote possibility of an incredibly sophisticated hoax always exists.
(and I was surprised to find so many outraged posts about it and so many thin arguments against it)

So basically you're saying that they faked hours of film footage, tens of thousands of photographs, sent secret unmanned probes to pick up a quarter ton of moon rock, sent a fake capsule to the moon not once but six times from which they sent a fake lander that placed mirrors on the lunar surface and sent out fake radio signals of a fake lunar mission. That is an enormously complex plot. It seems to me that it would be easier to just land a man on the damn moon.

That is an enormously complex plot.

To be fair, he has not specified a plot. That's the problem. RalofTyr hasn't even gone so far as to suggest how any of the Apollo fakery might actually be accomplished; he has just raised the abstract possibility that some fakery scenario or process might exist as an alternative. That's the ultimately lazy conspiracy theory. But because he hasn't described his posulated process, it's premature to reject as overly complex.

But by the same token, that's why such idle speculation, which RalofTyr evidently has not thought through, has absolutely no explanatory value, and why rejecting it on its face is not a personal attack or a sign of entrenchment on our part.

RalofTyr wants to make us seem ignorant or dismissive for believing in the authenticity of Apollo despite his alternative. He seems to think that it's silly to believe something even when some remote, purely conjectural possibility might exist. He seems to think our belief is not informed. Unfortunately mine certainly is, and to displace my belief in the authenticity of Apollo would require a stronger case for fakery than for authenticity. And that requires him actually to prove the proposition that the Apollo record was created by fakery. Then and only then can we weigh that possibility against the authenticity proposition according to real evidence and see which one comes out on top.

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

You're welcome.
Not being a gamer, I'm not familiar with those, but if it's a comparison to virtual reality taken as being real, those are good examples.
I was being brief. A more detailed explanation would be if an avowed solipsist dies, and the world continues to exist, that's a disproof. An even better one would be two solipsists, one of whom dies, while the other continues to exist. Then there's the universal application which appears to be inherent in the philosophy, i.e., that everything is the creation of one mind. The problem there is once the person who first thought of that and believed it dies, then it becomes an invalid philosophical position for those whose continue to exist.

A really nicely done book by Mark Twain called The Mysterious Stranger has solipsism as part of its basis. Meanwhile, to paraphrase a portion of that book, I hope Ral is just relating a bad dream and/or pulling our respective legs.

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A person's name, or a mark representing it, as signed personally or by deputy, as in subscribing a letter or other document.

I'm not sure if this would represent a disproof to the surviving solipsist, Mak. He'd be more likely to go "Yeah baby - I knew it was me all along!"

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

"Certainly, in the topsy-turvy world of heavy rock, having a good solid piece of wood in your hand is often useful." - Ian Faith

My point was more that it's nothing new nor outrageous, that the remote possibility of an incredibly sophisticated hoax always exists.

The claim "there is a remote possibility of a hoax" must be proven too. There are no claims that hold by default.

There's really no way to disprove a pure solipsism position. From the perspective of any individual, the outer world can never be proven to exist. Cogito ergo sum is as far as you can get, regardless of Descartes' attempt to build upon it.

There's even a sense in which it's a valid position, sort of. What we call a mind seems to be a construct within our brains, but our brain only has the evidence of the senses on which to base its model of the external world. Senses can be fooled, as we've all seen (think optical illusions, for instance). So even the most materialistic among us have to concede that we are, at best, a step or two removed from that external reality.

I think that the best modern illustration of solipsism is The Matrix.

None of this does much to inform the MHCT debate, though.

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Relight the 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)

The only difference between a hallucination and reality, is that more people are likely to agree with you about reality.

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Senses can be fooled,

How could a solipsist find that out?

There are no default positions that you get to hold for free. If you make a claim, you have the burden to marshal evidence that supports that position.

One of the best, as concise, descricptions on the motivation of HBs is:
CTs, HBs and alike are people who never achieved anything of significance and desperately wish that nobody else did either.
I don't know whether to pity them or to feel scared by their stamina because they have an influence on other people. And sometimes so strong that it makes me cringe.
I work in an industrial research lab and one day got over a cup of coffee into a discussion with a college from another department about a recent "documentary" on the faked moon landings. I challenged him that he could name any topic that he had in mind that made him doubt the moon landing and that I could refute all of them. Guess what? I could and I did and still after half an hour of breathless monologues he said: still...I wonder! That was what really scared me: a man with a PhD was more likely to believe (not to accept!) some lingering doubts than to listen to testable facts!
Over here in Germany, a German minister (similar to your senators) for cultural affairs proposed to include religion into biology classes to further the eduaction for religion might give answers where science can't! That was half a year ago and she has been sacked now. But still I wonder whether the phenomenon of HBs or CTs is to be confined to fringe science only or whether it is a general human trait that can pop up in the most unlikely places.

Extracelestial

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Science is not a monument of received Truth but something that people do to look for truth. - Dennis Overbye

I don't think it is one of the best, actually; it's a vast oversimplification that simply doesn't apply to all of them. I've repeatedly listed about a half-dozen motivations, and while you're right about some, you are assuredly not right about all.

Oh, and you might want to correct Arthur C. Clarke's name in your sig line.

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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!"

Hi Gillianren,
well I didn't claim that the description is the only one. But as such a motivation is seen here around quite often I think it applies in more than 50% of the cases.
Can you give me the URL where you've listed the other motivations? I'd be interested in reading them.
Extracelestial
P.S.
Thanks for seeing the typo in my sign line

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Science is not a monument of received Truth but something that people do to look for truth. - Dennis Overbye

But still I wonder whether the phenomenon of HBs or CTs is to be confined to fringe science only or whether it is a general human trait that can pop up in the most unlikely places.

I wonder that myself. The comments on solipsism and Descartes' philosophy of doubt in this thread and elsewhere suggests that people generally accept as sound and fundamental the notion that everything could be a grand deception. Many will vigorously defend that position in philosophical debates until, well, the wife hollers for them or they have to leave for work. The pressures of life tends to move such broad-spectrum doubts to the back burner. Those in the grips of conspiracy theory, however, don't appear to be capable of allowing real life the opportunity to override particular doubts.

Are we all that far from being conspiracy theorists?

I'm not sure of the exact figure. Somewhere around 50% may be right, but I'd have to go back and look over more threads before I'd consider it accurate. Further, even that would just be a survey of the CTs and HBs who post here. I, personally, am of the opinion that, for every one that posts here, there are probably five or ten who quietly hold a CT view on something and don't post here, because they don't think about it often enough to bother trying to convince anyone else unless that person brings it up first; more on them anon.

It appears not; I've just spent about ten minutes looking for the relevant thread, and I can't find it. Weird, huh? However.

Yes. There are some, perhaps many, driven by the need to denigrate others' accomplishments because they've never accomplished anything. Actually, the longer I think about it, the less I believe that they're a majority. The group I do think is the majority is the group who like to Know Something Other People Don't. This is tied to the first, but it isn't the first. When you point out that what they think they know is wrong, they handle it badly because you're taking them out of their special status, and they want so desperately to be special about something.

There's the ones in it for a buck; we've certainly seen those. There are some--not many, but some--that I consider mentally ill. (I can find the thread about that discussion; it's over in BABBling. I thought the other was in Q&A, but I can't find it. Maybe I'm just looking past it.) I can name you two people that I really, genuinely believe are schizophrenic and need help. Now, the first group is the one I have the most contempt for, and the second is the one I have the most compassion for. However, between them, I think they do the most damage to the knowledge level of others.

And then, there are the just plain ignorant. The untold numbers who saw that blasted Fox special and nothing to rebut it, and so they think it's presented some interesting, valid arguments that they've never seen overcome. The people who want to believe that there's something greater to the three big crisis-based, even tragic, CTs--that's Kennedy, Pearl Harbor, and 9/11, none of which we can really discuss here, but the first is probably the most pervasive CT in the US. Hardly anybody, it seems, believes in the Lone Gunman theory. There is a certain belief that holds that it's because Oswald was such a nobody, and nobodies can't change history like that. Nineteen guys cannot be responsible for such devastation. And so forth. Now, often, when we get the ignorant ones here or at Apollo Hoax, we can show them that they are ignorant, and they start to really think about what they believe and why, often realizing that the weight of the evidence actually favours what they were taught in school. However, most of them don't ever think to come here or to Apollo Hoax. Why should they? Clearly, everyone already knows that the "official story" of whatever-it-is is wrong!

Oh, no worries--I know you're not a native speaker, but names are one of the things I'll correct anyway.

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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!"

'Nobodies' change history all the time.

It's just that nobody notices it.

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Join the Illuminati

I don't know that I would go that far, Joe. I would wonder if someone who seriously entertains a solipsistic philosophy is not a step removed from a delusional personality disorder.

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

"Certainly, in the topsy-turvy world of heavy rock, having a good solid piece of wood in your hand is often useful." - Ian Faith

Heh. I've often thought that the best punishment history could afford Oswald is the one he got--to this day, most people don't think he was very important. At any rate, he also fits into another category that I forgot to mention: Those who distrust the US/its government just on principle, not because of any specific evidence of wrongdoing in that instance, but because they know that the US/its government is Evil.

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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!"

Please let me challenge you with this: "If the CIA... an agency whose very existance is based on keeping secrets, can not keep its most important national secrets for much longer than a decade or so before things leak out.... How do you expect thousands of rocket engineers (most of whom are undisciplined and opposed to secrecy in general) to keep quiet for 50 years?"

Please dont say there were only four people in the know... thats nonsense... a bloke who spends every waking hour working out how to track his rocket on its path to the moon isnt going to keep quiet when there is no rocket on his radar..... and there are THOUSANDS like him who would know if there was not a real mission. And thousands more scientists working on results from missions.... try and fool them for very long.

If you are a hoax believer then you are prepared to believe the preposterous without any facts and in the face of overwhelming evidence. We should just let you be.... unfortunately there seems to be a growing percentage of people who would rather believe unsubstantiated fairy tales than scientifically proven facts. I do worry about our society.

It's oddly parsimonious, isn't it? "There are things that look wrong to me. 'The' government has many secret plots and plans and lies constantly about everything. Therefor, it is more than likely that these things I see are simply inconsistencies in the cover stories of these ongoing massive conspiracies."

Hey, if you really did have dozens of parallel conspiracies being run by shadowy consortiums involving everyone from early Bavarian glee clubs to shape-changing reptilliods with a tendency towards weak chins and large ears, you would, in any real physical world, have endless inconsistencies born of compromise, abrupt policy shifts and organizational infighting, and the ordinary error of just trying to keep so many different stories straight.



(Whew! Gillian, can you loan me some punctuation? I seem to be out of everything but commas!)

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

How do you expect thousands of rocket engineers (most of whom are undisciplined and opposed to secrecy in general) to keep quiet for 50 years?

Actually most aerospace engineers are highly disciplined. I think I understand what you mean, but you might want to clarify it.

Opposed to secrecy? Well, not when the nature of the job requires it. Most engineers have to keep industrial secrets. And a few have to be complicit in keeping government secrets because they are the ones who invented the thing being kept secret.

The kind of secrecy that rubs engineers the wrong way is that which seems to have no logical purpose. Meaningless "need to know" compartmentalization, for example. Engineers are pretty good at determining when secrets are being kept for the wrong reasons. The bottom line is that engineering requires information, and when important information is withheld without apparent cause, then engineers become suspicious and angry.

The thing that would most upset engineers about faking the Moon landings is simply the fakery itself. Engineers thrive on being given interesting problems to solve, not on deception or the mere appearance of success. If you tell an engineer he's going to help send people to the Moon, he'll work day and night to make it happen. If you tell him he's going to be part of an elaborate ruse, he'll tell you to take a flying leap.

The Apollo engineers in particular had nothing to gain and everything to lose by participating in a fake. The names associated with Apollo may not mean much to the conspiracy theorists, but they are well known and respected in the aerospace world. These were men and women who came to Apollo already having been successful at other aerospace tasks. Fraud, if discovered, would end their careers. There would simply be no incentive to lend their good names to something they knew was false.

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

I'm an engineer who does not work in the aerospace business, but during my career I have encountered a handful of engineers who did work on Apollo. Each of them considered their Apollo contribution, no matter how small, to be the highlight of their career.

It is clear to me that these folks were not part of some grand conspiracy, and labored to create a system to take people to the moon. If the moon landings were faked, they were done so with lots of subsystems that would have worked.

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

We feed the hb's when we disagree over pedantic definitions. Those engineers, like the younger ones of today, want the free flow of information that is part of their profession. A commercial secret about a process or some-such can be kept because of their individual integrity.... for a while at least.... but the basic tenet that even well needed secrets are rarely kept secret for decades is true across the board. Also, the more participants, the shorter the secrets' half-life.

The argument often put forward by HBs is that only a small number of people were aware of the fakery, and that everyone else at NASA and its contractors genuinely believed Apollo was real.

The problem is that, if things were faked, there was one other fairly large group who must have been involved in fakery - the people who filmed the fake. How many people would be involved in set construction, filming, sound, lighting (particularly important!), script writing, electrical work, and all the other jobs I can only guess about?

Now the HB argument will probably be, "Well you'd tell these people they were only involved in training sessions." But the set builders are going to see their sets being promoted as the Moon on TV; the script writers are going to hear their words promoted as what the astronauts said on the Moon; the cameramen are going to see what they were filming being passed off as something actually happening on the Moon. How can all these people not realise they're part of a fake?

So you have to add perhaps 100 people to any list of people who knew stuff was being faked - people who were involved in the production of the fake itself: people in the movie industry.

What would motivate them to keep silent for NASA? A chance to work on "All the President's Men"?