Last weekend I gave a talk about the Apollo Hoax theories at a science fiction convention here in Canberra (Conflux 6 - www.conflux.org.au).

Rather than go through the laundry list of hoax claims, I took a slightly different angle. After all, I was at a science fiction convention, and a lot of the people there (including me) were writers. So what I did was look at the way the Apollo hoax has been presented in fiction, and show the problems with the way these stories presented the hoax. I discussed two movies and a short story, and tried to look for story angles that people might be able to use. The movies were "Capricorn One" and "Diamonds Are Forever", and the short story was Dwayne Day's "It can easily be accomplished with a computer".

In the hope that others might be interested in my thoughts, I thought I'd summarise them.

Capricorn One
1. Just before launch, the crew are evacuated from the spacecraft. To do so they had to unplug their oxygen hoses, something which would have been noticed by Mission Control. But if we assume that shortly before this was when fake data was being fed to Mission Control, you instead have the changeover problem - I doubt it would be possible to seamlessly override genuine data with fake data. Instead, you're going to have a bunch of people suddenly notice figures on their screens suddenly change.

2. The number of people involved in this hoax is massive. How does NASA make sure none spill the beans?

3. Supposedly the company making the life support system made a dodgy product. Presumably a few engineers in the company and in NASA would notice this. These people would then no doubt be surprised if the mission went ahead and the crew survive, and be tempted to spill the beans. This was one story opportunity - an engineer contemplating blowing the whistle.

3a. Someone in the audience pointed out that NASA would have been hard pressed to put together a believable fake in the three weeks between the dodgy product being discovered and the launch date. I replied that extending that time period would also be problematic, as it would increase the chance of someone going to the media.

4. Using telemetry and voices recorded from sims wouldn't work once a problem arose for which there were no recordings of the astronauts' voices providing appropriate responses. Also, at some point someone in Mission Control might twig that they'd heard the astronaut say in a sim exactly what he'd just heard "live".

5. Slowing the footage of the astronaut leaping off the ladder doesn't work, as it produces different effects from low gravity movement (as the Mythbusters showed).

6. In the TV transmission near the end of the mission, the astronauts do nothing to demonstrate they're in zero G, something the Apollo astronauts constantly enjoyed doing. Also, one of the astronauts cries, and his tears run down his face, which wouldn't happen in zero G.

7. No rocks could be brought back by a faked mission, yet it's inconceivable that astronauts would go all the way to Mars and not bring them back. Any rocks supplied would therefore have to be from the Earth, which would be quickly revealled. Therefore, it should have been apparent to everyone that the spacecraft couldn't possibly be allowed to return to Earth. Despite this, the actual failure of the spacecraft in the movie appears to have been unanticipated by everyone.

Diamonds Are Forever
1. Why did the astronauts move in slow motion? Were they such method actors that, even when it had to be apparent to everyone that they weren't on the Moon, they still behaved as though they were?

It can easily be accomplished with a computer
1. The size of the cavern is nowhere near enough for the Apollo footage we see.

2. The multiple lights described would have produced multiple shadows, which we don't see.

3. It would be impossible to drive the lunar rover on the Earth and get the footage we see on Apollo 16.

4. Lunar soil behaves in a way in the Apollo footage which is consistent with a low gravity vacuum. This isn't possible to achieve on the Earth, and certainly not with the site lines we have on the Apollo footage.

Now sadly, there were only about ten people at my talk (there were only about 50 people at the con altogether), but it was a fun talk to give, and I know I can use it again in the future.

It sounds interesting. I haven't seen Diamonds Are Forever--I don't care for James Bond--and I haven't read the short story, but I agree with everything you said about Capricorn One and found even more flaws. Like did you see how small the studio they're in was?

__________________
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!"

Good point. I didn't think to pursue that too much, basically because there were no long camera shots built into the movie itself - all we see are the astronauts jumping off the ladder, then footage of the camera pointed at the ground as one of the astronauts carries it away. The next logical action would be for the astronaut to set the camera up on a tripod and do a 360 degree panorama, but we don't see that - obviously because such a shot would reveal where the astronaut was. So by ignoring the panorama, the movie's director gets to sidestep a fairly major plot hole.

Of course, there are other plot holes of various forms. I didn't bother with the problem of using a Saturn V rocket to travel to Mars, or using a Lunar Module to land on Mars, because I saw their use as symbolic rather than representational. More serious were the reporter's activities: his NASA friend has disappeared and been replaced by a woman who has supposedly been living there for months, yet he doesn't ask the neighbours; in the time he talks to this woman, people mess with his car to disable the foot brake, jam the accelerator, freeze the gear stick in Drive, disable the ignition and disable the hand brake; and when he visits the Wild West ghost town, the unseen gunman shoots at him only a couple of times and doesn't pursue him. It would have taken little work to remove these implausibilities. But then it still would have left the ones I mentioned in the original post.

The men first walk onto that soundstage early in the film, and it's tiny. As in, I'd barely want to film a talking-heads documentary in it. It was one of the things which struck me most, honestly, because I know a wee bit about film by this point. Anyway, here's what I thought. (This has been posted before, but still.)

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/user/2....php?id=597426

__________________
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!"