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.

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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.

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.

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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

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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 t