Hi, crookster_man. Welcome to the board.

Hold on everyone, I'm not some wack job that is stuck to some magical hypothesis. I was merely asking questions that intrigued me about the moon landings.

I think you got a strong reaction because a number of posters have come on here "just asking questions" who quickly turned out to be hard-core True Believers. Not that I'm saying you are.

As for the statement about the photos, I should have clarified that. I want to see high resolution photos that are analyzed by experts to prove their validity. I was quite shocked to learn that there were any photos at all (the ones you provided were quite interesting).

You should look at the many thousands of high-resolution still images referenced at ALSJ, or the hundreds of hours of motion imagery. You should look at the tens of thousands of pages of detailed design, operational, training, management, and budget documents, and oral histories. You should look at some of the flight and test hardware if you have a chance. You should look at the thousands of research papers written based on science results from Apollo. You should look at aerospace standard practice today (that's my line of work) and how deeply it was influenced by Apollo.

There's so much of it you literally couldn't examine it all in detail. Not in your lifetime.


You should also look at the evidence for a faked program: the money that was spent on hardware that placed retroreflectors, the testimony of the scientists and engineers who had to fool all the rest of the scientists and engineers - not just at the time, but for generations afterward, the way real spacecraft aren't designed, built, tested, and operated anything like Apollo, the physical principles which kept Apollo from succeeding, the images and detritus of the giant (far larger than the Astrodome) vacuum chambers with artificial gravity which would have been required to stage the lunar scenes.

Oh, wait, there isn't any of that.

Though the resolution was so far away that it wouldn't have been impossible to fake those photos, not that I'm saying they are! Only that they are not of high enough detail to be conclusive for me.

Here's the rub. Why would you accept a picture from orbit - the easiest thing to fake - as conclusive, instead of the staggeringly vast record of imagery and physical artifacts and engineering and science data and all the other things which have convinced all the world's scientists and engineers?

As for "not truly knowing anything". Nothing is wrong with having a skeptical mind. As Socrates said "An unexamined life is not worth living". I would think people such as yourselves (educated and scientific) would embrace such a philosophy.

I think I do. But I also embrace the notion that some things are actual fact. I don't need to keep entertaining, for example, the notion that maybe the Korean War didn't actually happen.

Further more, I did try to locate some photos of the landing site on Google before I came here and was unsuccessful, though I will admit I didn't look very hard. (I did look hard a few months ago but came up empty. I guess these LRO photos are relatively new. Sorry for not being current!).

LRO only entered lunar orbit a few months ago, and the first Apollo site images were only released back in July.

I can tell by my warm welcome that you probably have a lot of crazies come to this forum. I promise I am not that. Though I might challenge the accepted ideas from ancient history to the moon landing I assure you that I am open minded to most things.

So you're open-minded to the idea that they really happened, and that there's no credible evidence for hoax claims? Would you entertain the notion that the matter might actually be settled?

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Jay, allow me to expand on what you've said, if I may.

"The Earth is flat" and "we landed on the Moon" are not comparable statements. Try something closer to "Julius Caesar was Emperor of Rome." This is not an issue of science per se; it's an issue of history. Now, there's a lot about history that's been speculative, and no student of history would deny that. However, there is a certain amount of evidence which can build up until such a point where there is no more reasonable doubt, and you're obviously just stretching for the sake of stretching.

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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!"

Don't forget the welcomes to Huma as well.

Welcome, Huma.

Thanks Glom!

I am not sure about how accurate this is, but isn't it true that the images taken of the Apollo landings sites are not the best the LRO has to offer? Meaning, there are better pictures of the site that is capable of?.

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Defining science can be difficult. It’s a method, a way of looking at things. It’s a compendium of facts, knowledge, data. It’s a tool, used to investigate the world and to make sure we don’t let our biases, egos, and wishes get in the way of finding what’s real. Science (and skepticism) boil off the dross and leave the pure nugget of reality. ~Phil Plait

Thanks for the welcome! I didn’t have any idea that my posts would get such attention! Looks like I kicked up a hornets’ nest. I’m sorry I can’t get back to everyone right now I am just getting in tonight and don’t have the time right now. That being said the general them was quite clear.

The evidence you and your group have supplied is quite staggering. I’ve look through some of it and I can see why you believe the orthodox storey of the moon landing. To be honest I don’t believe that the landings were hoax, though to speculate is fun. So let’s just do that.

Some of you talk of 10,000s of thousands of workers conspiring with scientists, government, media and many more. The allocation of billions of dollars into secret programs and portray this is evidence of the absurdity of the conspiracy. I agree, the idea of such a conspiracy is ridiculous.
But isn’t that just another “straw man” argument? You create a rather ridiculous and improbable scenario, and then state since this scenario is ridiculous, there can be no conspiracy.

Speculation… What if all the vast majority of the workers were just doing their job at some test site? What if the filming of the moon landing was nothing more than a test run for most? What if men really went to the moon, secretly because they wanted to hide what they discovered and the “hero’s we know are nothing more than puppets, face men for the storey.

Or maybe the conspiracy is way off. Maybe we were on the moon, maybe Neil grab some lunar dirt and put the flag on the ground. But maybe he and his crew were always just the show, while the real experiments on the “secret things” were being conducted behind the scenes? Workers at military bases that supposedly “launch satellites” wouldn’t know any different.

Of course that is just plain speculation. You would naturally say “Where is the evidence to even hint at such a possibility?” The burden of proof lays with me the” theorist”. As so it should. Though I wonder… Can you entertain the idea that the matter may not be settled at all?

Rest assured I do not refute the claim that man has landed on the moon. Have no evidence to do so.

From what I hear, once it gets into a lower orbit, we'll be getting better pictures.

Yes, but don't expect anything close to the images that astronauts took when they were on the moon.

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Disclaimer: Avatar is not an official NASA image and does not imply any specific interplanetary or interstellar capability.

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I wonder if it will be able to see were Mr. Armstrong "wrote his name in the snow"? I would of.

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In your rush to call everyone "entrenched" or closed-minded or "limited" you fail to note that the "limit" here has a very natural boundary: that point at which the evidence stops. - JayUtah

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Best will be about half meter resolution. There have been some images that have shown the disturbed surface where astronauts walked, so if somebody did something really large, it might be visible, but otherwise, no.

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Disclaimer: Avatar is not an official NASA image and does not imply any specific interplanetary or interstellar capability.

The Leif Ericson Cruiser

I don't think that the scale that such a hoax would have to be has been underestimated.
The massive amount of information generated by Apollo which is publicly available is staggering. The amount of work to have to do in order to 'fake' it all would be vast.

To pick an example during Apollo 16 they took a small ultra-violet observatory which took pictures of the stars and earth in the UV spectrum. And those pictures returned were published a few weeks after the mission.
The positions of the stars and the earth can be located very accurately and indicate that they were taken from the moon, where Apollo 16 landed at the time they landed.
UV astronomy can not really be done from earth as our atmosphere absorbs UV light very well.

All the missions were rehearsed beforehand but no one could confuse those with being on the moon. There is video available showing those.

Then there are sequences like :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sk5Gi...e=channel_page
I don't even see how it is possible to fake that. It would probably cause even the best special effects team available today huge problems.

I also doubt that.
There is just no real military significance for the moon. Which is probably one reason why there is so little motivation to go back.

I entertain the possibility that there might have been things going on in the background that I am not aware of. But the chances of a large conspiracy such as those you speculated on are as close to zero as you can get.

That is really confusing to my eyes. Something about expecting the dirt to fall one way, like on earth, but it just doesn't. Very cool to actually watch!

__________________
Defining science can be difficult. It’s a method, a way of looking at things. It’s a compendium of facts, knowledge, data. It’s a tool, used to investigate the world and to make sure we don’t let our biases, egos, and wishes get in the way of finding what’s real. Science (and skepticism) boil off the dross and leave the pure nugget of reality. ~Phil Plait

Well skeptism is usually a good thing, in the case of overwhelmening evidence contrary to your own view point, it is not.

Oxams' Razor: The simplest answer is usually the correct one.

The Apollo Hoax, to be belivable would require a worldwide conspiracy involving millions that worked on the missions, monitored them, watched them real time from remote sensing stations (including by enemy states at the time) to -ALL- be lying about it, and still be lying about it after all this time without being continulay paid off...

Yet the same goverment that supposedly faked the moon landings couldn't even hide the Iran/Contra arms sales scandal for more then a few months? (I was personaly involved in -that- one)

Oxams' Razor applies here, the Hoax theroies require such a complex, disconnected and unrealistic senerio, that the simplest answer is: We actualy did go to the Moon.

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http://worldsofothersuns.home.comcast.net/

We're all open to speculation, provided you are willing to actually engage in the discussion. All too frequently here we get people who specualte, propose scenarios, get loads of responses, then propose alternatives without addressing anything in the previous posts. You'll find we get tired of that very quickly, so please do bear that in mind.

That's not quite the argument. We don't propose that scenario at all. It is in fact the default position of most hoax believers before they actually are told how absurd it is. If man did not land on the Moon then there WAS a conspiracy. For most hoax proponents that's as far as they go in their thought processes. It is therefore quite sufficent for us to point out that they need to go away and think a bit harder, since a conspiracy involving up to 400,000 people is absurd.

Response: equally absurd. How can you compartmentalise Apollo in such a way as most people think it's real? If the engineers actually building the hardware don't know it's fake then they'll build working hardware. That's what engineers do. NASA didn't give out a set of plans and tell some comapny to build the spacecraft, they took proposals from a number of companies and awarded the contracts to those they selected. NASA didn't design the LM, Grumman did. NASA didn't design the Apollo spacecraft, North American did. Although the basic design of the Saturn V originated in NASA, Boeing, North Amercican and Douglas actually refined the design and built the stages, while IBM designed and built the instrumentation to drive it. If each of those companies believes they are required to design and build a working piece of hardware that's exactly what they'll do. If you have working hardware, why fake it at all? If only one company knows its fake, that's still hundreds of people who have to know, because you can't just tell engineers they're building a spacecraft and expect them not to notice that it actually won't work. Further down the line you can't give a non-functional spacecraft to the testing crew and expect them not to notice it doesn't work.

That's a really bad way to keep a secret, because you automatically add more people who have to keep it secret. Not only do the 'public' astronauts have to know, your secret astronauts have to know. Further, this isn't confined to the astronauts, you then need a whole new set of mission controllers on the ground. The ones we know quite definitely were taking part in the fake public mission, so who's running the secret real one?

This is conspiracy theorist fallacy number one: I don't know therefore no-one else does either. It is, IMO, just a little arrogant to suggest that a bunch of trained rocket launchers wouldn't be able to tell the difference between an unmanned launch and a manned one. You could no more slip a crewed lunar mission past a bunch of missile engineers than you could fool me by telling me a tube of fake Hollywood blood is an actual blood sample. To some any suitably coloured liquid might pass for blood, but I have professional experience handling blood, so I'd recognise a fake when I saw it. Similarly, the workers launching rockets would notice the difference between an unmanned and manned vehicle, and they'd notice the difference between a vehicle intended to launch a satellite and one launching a manned lunar landing flight, just as you could tell the difference between a boating lake canoe and an ocean liner.

I consider the matter settled until someone provides a better explanation for the vast amounts of evidentiary material than the official story: that several manned missions went ot rthe Moon and were televised live. So far, despite 40 years, we have no convincing alternative.

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"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.

You presuppose that the orthodox conspiracy theory is the only one. There is your mistake.

You assume that for their to be a conspiracy that there must be many people involved in a gigantic cover up. I have another answer to the anomalies that the conspiracy theorists speak of.

Some of them are nothing more then imagination. Shadows in pictures (multi light sources), the appearance of multiple back drops used in different photos. Others are a little more interesting, the lack of disturbed earth around the lander to be one.

I would suggest an alternative answer. There are some fake photos of the moon landing, they were taken before hand to be easily distributed on Earth, the clarity and quality of the image enhanced so that the correct message is relayed to the people viewing the photos. That of American dominance in the space race.

The moon landings did occur as we saw on the Televised video. The conspiracy here is one of vanity. Nasa and through it the government wanted to ensure the correct message was delivered.

Is that a possible scenario, it does help explain the abnormalities that exist in the photos we have now. Unless of course you are willing to dispute that fact.

It's not enough to suggest. Your next step is to provide evidence that your suggestion is the more likely explanation. For instance, you have not established that there are abnormalities. You seem to be taking typical HB objections at face value, then developing your alternatives.

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Brett
Peters Creek, Alaska
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Plus, if the pictures were taken before the missions how did they get the appearance of the Moon to match the real pictures, tv and film footage so perfectly? If they were taken after then when? Also after the missions they would have seen that the actual pictures were good enough.

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What specific abnormalities do you have in mind?

How did you determine that they were truly abnormal, and not the perfectly normal and expected results of NASA doing what it claimed to do, using the tools and methods it claimed to have used?

The ground around the lander IS disturbed. Indeed, photographs were taken to specifically document that disturbance. Where you fall down is assuming that you know what the disturbance should look like. I'd be interested to know what you base that conclusion on.

Problem 1: the TV, film and photographs match up. Events seen on the TV are documented by the photos. You can in some cases literally pinpoint the moment some pictures were taken. Some instances are covered by three separate visual documentation methods: TV, 16mm film and 70mm photographs.

Problem 2: how do you take photos in advance that just happen to match up in terms of terrain and other features to sites that haven't been visited yet? Which pictures are real and which are fake? How do you tell the differences between them?

Question: have you familiarised yourself with the sheer volume of visual record available just for the flights that actually landed? Do you know how many photos there are, how many hours of video and how many feet of film?

I dispute the anomalies first and foremost.

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"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.

You need to be more careful about what you're claiming. You've already been caught once making claims without first doing research. You might be surprised to learn the truth about your alleged lack of disturbed "earth" around the lander.

Of course the legitimate and truthful record of a successful manned moon mission would deliver the exact same message, without running the risk of being exposed as a fraud by the very people the message is supposed to impress.

Apollo 7 successfully tested the Saturn 5 launch vehicle, and the Apollo Command Module in Earth orbit.

Apollo 8 successfully tested the Saturn 5, and the Apollo Command and Service Modules to the Moon and back.

Apollo 9 successfully tested the Apollo Lunar Module (and CSM) in Earth orbit.

Apollo 10 successfully tested the CSM and LM in Lunar orbit, including a test flight of the LM to within 16 kilometers of the Lunar surface. This mission was a successful test of everything but the landing itself.

Apollo 11 successfully tested the LM all the way to, and landing on, the Lunar surface.

Apollo 12 demonstrated precision landing capability, placing the LM within walking distance of the Surveyor 3 probe already on the Lunar surface.

And so on.

crookster_man, at what point, exactly, during this series of extremely successful, highly public, and thoroughly documented messages of "American dominance in the space race", do you suggest that NASA should have deviated from a policy of recording and publishing what actually happened, in favor of presenting some fake version of the real projects they were really carrying out?

A better way to enhance the quality of the images would be to modify cameras to make them easier to use while wearing spacesuit gloves, have the astronauts spend a lot of time practicing photography during their training, and have the astronauts take multiple photographs of the same scene/object so that if one of them doesn't come out well, you still have a chance at a good picture. Then if a picture still leaves something to be desired, you can make some slight cosmetic alterations for newspaper or magazine publication like they did with AS11-40-5903. That's the official story of how NASA handled the photography and it makes a lot more sense than having "some fake photos."

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"One does not require alien ruins in order to absorb a profound sense of wonder and mystery from the moon. That our civilization had actually visited it is miracle enough." Jason Roberts

Large mountains viewed from far away tend be visible in much the same way from different locations.
The problem is that on the moon without any atmosphere to provide haze or and other natural object to provide a reference it is almost impossible to gauge the size of anything at a distance.

In the words of the great father Ted :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GmU_q5xrnto

There was a great deal of disturbed regolith from the landing site, and the photos show just that.

Correction: Apollo 7 was launched on a Saturn IB launch vehicle (the only manned Apollo mission to do so other than Apollo-Soyuz). I'd add the Apollo Service Module and the S-IVB upper stage to the components it tested, however.

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A correction to the correction !

The three missions to Skylab also used the Saturn-IB. This makes five manned S-IB missions in all.

See crookster_manWe don't let anybody get away with anything here.

Jon

There was also the unmanned missions, Apollo 2, which tested the S-IV b, Apollo 4, which test flew the Saturn V, Apollo 5, which tested the Lunar Module, and Apollo 6, which tested the CSM as well as Saturn V, as did Apollo 4.

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But we do occasionally say things twice (an important thing to remember for avoiding this happening to you is to be careful when refreshing after posting, if you haven't moved to another page it is likely to repost the message (and auto-refresh can cause real problems))

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What abnormalities? Specific examples please.

But isn’t that just another “straw man” argument?

No, it isn't. Conspiracy theorists generally have no idea what it really takes to pull of something of that magnitude. That's why you never hear any real detail about how it was accomplished. They give you a specific scenario here and there for some particular bit of cherry-picked observation (e.g., the little crosshairs in the photos), but you never get the whole end-to-end theory.

A straw-man rebuttal occurs when the argument is complex but the rebuttal is simplistic. When the argument itself is simplistic and the rebuttal points to a larger necessary complexity, then the argument itself is mere handwaving.

For example, the compartmentalization theory is often put forward: that only the "guys at the top" knew, and everyone else just did what they were told; or that each little work group went on its merry way and didn't ever see the big picture. This is said to accommodate hundreds of thousands of people working on Apollo with only a few trusted people knowing what was really going on.

It's not a straw-man rebuttal to point out that that's not how engineers actually work. Many of us here are engineers and work in that industry. We can see the absurd oversimplicity of the conspiracy theorist's claims. The ones who know whether it's going to work or not aren't the guys at the top -- they're the guys at the bottom. None of the conspiracy theorists is an engineer or has ever been within 10 miles of a job in aerospace. They just make up a sort of cartoonish version of what the engineering industry must be like: a version that fits their theory, but not reality.

Further, that's simply not what happened with Apollo. Part of the Apollo record, and of the recollection of those who participated, is the massive cross-training effort that occurred. You see people working, say, on the environmental controls attending classes on the electrical and propulsion systems. We have their study guides heavily festooned with their marginal notes. I have feet of shelf space devoted to manuals and documents describing the inner workings of these spacecraft systems, all of them having been available to anyone outside the project. There are countless academic arguments and symposia devoted to how the system was going to work.

Conspiracy theorists really are just proposing an alternate reality that contradicts a large amount of evidence. We properly reject it.

What if the filming of the moon landing was nothing more than a test run for most?

Test runs can be, and often were, stopped or postponed. How do you allow people to perform on what they believe is a test footing but then propose to use it as a false reality?

But maybe he [Armstrong] and his crew were always just the show, while the real experiments on the “secret things” were being conducted behind the scenes?

Workers at military bases that supposedly “launch satellites” wouldn’t know any different.

Can you entertain the idea that the matter may not be settled at all?

Of course. But how does pure speculation unsettle the matter? The problem with conspiracy theorists is that they expect us and the rest of their readers to entertain speculation as if it were a serious challenge to the status quo. If it takes only pure speculation to unseat historical fact, why stop at the mundane claims you've made? Why not speculation that the whole Apollo program was a figment of our imaginations, beamed into our skulls by space aliens who wanted us wrongly to believe we had left Earth? What if we're all just in the Matrix?

Speculation simply doesn't unseat evidence. So there's no point in trying to suggest we're "closed-minded" because we know the difference between speculation and fact.

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Clavius Moon Base

Is that a possible scenario...?

Not really. It requires photographers to have been monumentally stupid for having created "implausible" photos by means they should have known would not work or be appropriate.

it does help explain the abnormalities that exist in the photos we have now. Unless of course you are willing to dispute that fact.

It's not a fact, it's a belief. And yes, I'm willing to dispute it.

Unlike any of the conspiracy theorists, I have training and experience in photographic analysis and interpretation. I see no "abnormalities" in the Apollo photos, but I see instead a wealth of evidence pointing to the ignorance and dishonesty of conspiracy theorists when dealing with photographic evidence.

Conspiracy theorists say things along the lines, "If this were a real photograph, it should look like..." and then they say, "This Apollo photograph looks a different way, therefore it 'had' to have been faked."

The problem is that none of the conspiracists has validated his expectations. The Apollo photographs are being measured against a standard that is, itself, pure speculation and is often absurdly wrong. None of the conspiracy theorists seems to know anything about parallax, for example.

None of them seems to have tested his theory, either. You get diagrams and handwaving speculation about how studio lights would behave, allegedly showing that the effects in Apollo photographs might have been produced that way. How comical they appear when real lighting designers demonstrate that the conspiracists' descriptions are not how such lights behave, and instead often they behave the opposite!

We're often told that we have to open our minds and leave behind our assumptions in order to get at the truth. What we find, however, is that conspiracy-theory fans have simply fallen for some ignorant author's assumptions hook-line-and-sinker, and never demanded from that author that he test his assumptions nor tested them themselves.

One of the articles of faith for conspiracy theorists, for example, is that shadows cast by the sun should always appear parallel in photographs. How easy it is for anyone with a camera (and honestly does that exclude anyone in the civilized world?) to test that theory and demonstrate that it's simply not true. But why do the hoax fans never perform that test or believe it when it's performed by others?

Sorry, the notion that Apollo photographs contain "abnormalities" that challenge their authenticity is not a fact: it's a figment of the imaginations of untrained people who have not the courtesy to validate their expectations.

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

Another correction! A ha! There was no mission called Apollo 2. There was AS-201, AS-202, AS-203, which were unmanned test flights of bits of kit, all involving the Saturn IV (and hence the S-IVB booster). Then there was AS-204, which was posthumously renamed Apollo 1 after the fire. Then there was Apollo 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17.