Men on the Moon as a Matter of Fact

By Phil Plait







I wasn't surprised when the Fox television network aired a program earlier this year alleging that NASA faked the Apollo Moon missions that took place from 1968 to 1972. This particular conspiracy theory has been around as long as the Apollo program itself, but has had its life breathed anew thanks to this absurd television show.


The conspiracy theorists say they have proof for their beliefs. But their claims reveal tremendous ignorance of science, from the basic principles of photography to geology and physics. For example, the first bit of "proof" usually offered by the conspiracy theorists is the lack of stars in the Apollo images. Its true: nearly every picture taken from lunar orbit and from the Moon's surface shows a jet-black sky, completely devoid of stars. If the Moon has no air, the doubters say, the sky should be filled with stars!


That's just plain wrong. On the lunar surface the astronauts' cameras were loaded with low-speed film (Ektachrome 64 for color and Panatomic X for black and white) and set to expose for bright sunlight that is, for a fraction of a second. Even the brightest stars which are 10,000 times fainter than the full Moon looks from Earth and 10 billion times fainter than the Sun would require exposures of many seconds. That would have drastically overexposed any scenes of the astronauts, their lander and the Moon itself. A properly exposed photo made on the day side of the Moon just like one taken here on Earth of a brightly lit playing field at night wouldn't record any stars.


Furthermore, the astronauts did take some pictures that show stars. On Apollo 16, for example, John Young used a small ultraviolet telescope, placed in the shadow of the lunar module, to photograph distant stars and galaxies. And on several Apollo missions the orbiting command module pilots, while flying over the Moon's night side, photographed the stars and the faint solar corona, using ultrahigh-speed film and long exposures.


The conspiracy theorists look at the hours and hours of video transmissions sent back from the Moon, much of it in color and of very good clarity, and see in it evidence of fakery. Actually, its that very footage which proves men did walk on the Moon. When the astronauts booted feet hit the surface, the loose lunar soil sprayed up. In the vacuum environment, the dust particles act like little cannonballs, following a ballistic trajectory perfect parabolas that take them up and directly back down. If this had been faked in a Nevada film studio, as the conspiracy theorists claim, the extremely fine-grain dust would have billowed up, supported by the Earths thick atmosphere. Ironically, even though the Moons gravity is only one-sixth that of the Earth, the dust falls faster because there is no air to keep it aloft. Therefore, the only way this footage could have been taken was in a low gravity vacuum environment. For comparison, the 1968 movie, 2001: A Space Odyssey is Hollywood's best portrayal of spaceflight on film made during the Apollo era -- but it doesn't come close to portraying the visual characteristics of a Moonwalk accurately. Special to Space Illustrated Magazine: 30 June 2005

Here!!! Here!!!

I live around seniors. I have met 1 physicist, and 1 engineer that worked on the Apollo project. They both are amazing people with incredible stories. They and all the others have served this country well.

Landing on the moon is the most difficult feat that man has ever done. Nothing matches it. So many people were involved.

I lived in Huntington Beach, Calif. There were these gigantic buildings that were used to build the second stage of the Saturn V. Most of California was involved in building, testing, retesting, retesting, retesting...

A large part of America's GDP was involved in space exploration.

I watched it as a child. It is one of the only memories I have as a child. After the program ended, my father threw out the TV. Nothing else to watch.

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Evidence Of NASA Airbrushing Out Moon Anomalies




"Bill Kaysing was a librarian/writer of technical publications and advanced research at Rocketdyne Systems from 1956 to 1963. He states that it was estimated in 1959 that there was a .0014 chance of landing man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth. This took into account the effects of radiation, solar flares and micro meteorites. He could not believe in 1959 that man could go to the Moon.
However, only 2 years later, American President John F. Kennedy set a goal in May 1961, when he made the following famous speech. 'I believe that this nation should commit itself. To achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind or more important for the long range exploration of Space.' It was just eight years later in 1969, that man finally left Earth and set foot on the Moon... Or so we have been led to believe.

I would like to show you some astonishing evidence that shows glaring mistakes or anomalies on the 'official record' of NASA film footage and still photographs. I have included the actual official Apollo film footage on this page to illustrate and also possibly educate you, the reader, of the anomalies and to let you see with your own eyes what has become one of the biggest cover-ups in the history of Mankind. I will also explain why the US Government has tried to keep this a secret for over 30 years.

I would like to suggest that if Man did go to the Moon during the missions, the Apollo films that we were told were filmed on the Moon are bogus and not the real footage. Evidence suggests that Man could not travel to the Moon's surface, but instead they had to stay in near Earth orbit within the safety of the Earth's magnetic field that would have protected them from the radiation that is emitted by the Van Allen radiation belt!!!

But why would NASA and the United States bother to fake such an event and to what cause I hear you ask? Please read on and I will explain. Was man too optimistic about what we could actually do in deep space, and was President Kennedy's speech in May 1961 pressure enough to keep the hoax going?

David Percy is an award winning television and film producer, a professional photographer and also a member of the Royal Photographic Society. He is co-author, along with Mary Bennett, of the fascinating book 'Dark Moon: Apollo and the Whistle-Blowers' (ISBN 1-898541-10-8). The majority of the film footage on this page is taken from the film 'What Happened on the Moon?', a film that also features Percy and Bennett and one which I strongly recommend if you have an interest in the Apollo missions (details of how to purchase the video are at the bottom of this article). Percy firmly believes that the Apollo footage was either faked or not the original film that was shot on the Moon. He believes that many anomalous features that would alert the eagle eyed viewer, could have been placed in the films by whistle blowers who were deeply dissatisfied to be a part of the cover-up. He has studied the entire transfer of the original film on video tape, a feat that not many people have done. What many people did not realize at the time was that a lot of the footage was actually pre-recorded and not live at all."


The Faked Apollo Landings

I remember looking up at the Moon, during the first "Moon visit," and thinking; soon we'll be making regular trips to the Moon without much thought as to the difficulty. I have always wondered why we have never gone back.

Now, since I realize the media is a wholly owned subsidiary of the "powers that be," and the amount of wealth that can be extracted from the gullible populace, is incomprehensible, I can believe the Moon trips were a farce. I can believe that other discoveries are being withheld, too.

AAF: I would say that, according to the strict rules of psychology, questioning mainstream views, in this particular case, is very similar to questioning taboos and dogmas in general. At first, the people, under questioning, become very startled and agitated and extremely irritated and outraged. As the time goes on and the questioning continues, those people lose their anger and wild emotions little by little till they completely run out of excitation and go numb and unresponsive. From this point on, those questioned people start to recover and to become, in the end, moderate and open-minded and ready to accept the facts as they are without any distortion or filtering of any kind. In other words, mainstream unresponsiveness to challenges is a good sign! And for us it means 'victory'....



Anon: An example please? Are you talking about forum science or real science? As far as "self-proclaimed dissidents" are concerned, instead of complaining about unsolved problem, they can better solve these problems in a convincing way. Read the Baez crank index again.



AAF: One stark & confirming example is our former colleague, Cincirob! In the beginning, he was so full of rage and irritation because of those he used to call 'anti-relativists'. But in the end, he went numb and lost his anger and his old knee as well. And he just ran away...

I think he crawled back and is at the root of certain inane posts here, under the chicken alias of Anonymous.

JR, have you now understood where your energy disappears?



Or do you need maths to understand?

Nikola Tesla, for one, had little time for such arrogance:

Today's scientists have substituted mathematics for experiments, and they wander off through equation after equation, and eventually build a structure which has no relation to reality.

Reminds me your question about where does the energy go.
No maths and no relation to reality.
Typical question from ignorant.

It's a quote from your buddy, Tesla. Dummy!

You remind me of insolent cinci.

It is you who came with the folk stories with Tesla and Ampère.
I personally preffer understanding physics than reading people stories.

Before you mentioned Tesla here, I knew about him only as the units for the magnetic field.
In the same way, I don't care about the prehistory of electromagnetism, even though I can read french.

Our world is different now that we have landed on the moon. Many people experienced it. Just because you(esoteric) did not walk on the moon does not mean that others have not. There has been no evidence that has convinced me that these daring people did not.

The problem I have with the moon is where it is located. But wisdom states that it is always safe to land on the full moon. It is in a similar position in relation to the earth every full moon.

a

You don't care about History or Philosophy. Therefore you are existing in a vacuum. You have nothing to reference.

"You don't care about History or Philosophy. Therefore you are existing in a vacuum. You have nothing to reference."

History goes to the victor. It has nothing to do with the timeline of mankind's experience. We have forgotten more than we remember.

Philosophy is just the thoughts of others. It has nothing to do with correctness or validity.

I prefer to reference the data.

As for the validity of the moon landing, I bet Columbus had the same problem. But he brought back treasure. Treasure always causes people to reevaluate axioms. We brought back rocks. That does not exactly cause the excitement that gold does. Helium 3 should have cause great excitement but nobody understands the importance of He3

a

"You don't care about History or Philosophy. Therefore you are existing in a vacuum. You have nothing to reference."

Usually I don't care for the (pre-) history of physics.
When I do, it is most often because of difficulties of understanding.
In that case, I usually hope to find some help in looking at how the ideas had evolved.
Most often this does not work, mainly because of the cultural gap that widens too fast: today it is more difficult to read Maxwel than to learn QED.
I was always lead to conclude that the most recent and innovative book, even on an old topic, are more efficient.
(there are a few exceptions, like Landau or feynmann books that are out of time for some time)

My best example is the second law of thermodynamics.
I threw away my first book on thermodynamics through the window, because I was unhappy with the Caratheodory theorem and all that. This was too abstract. Simpler presentations did not heal my wounds nor did it repair the window. Fortunately I survived the "engineering thermodynamics" course as well as the "chemical thermodynamics" course, adn I was convinced of the practical relevance. I became kind of an expert by practical applications in the industry. But for the fundations, reading Carnot did not help a lot, although Bruhat was helpful. A modern introduction to statistical physics saved me definitively, and moreover it opened me a huge area of interrest that started with Brillouin's book: "Science and Information Theory".

My best advice is: don't take too much time for history and phylosophy, instead learn new ideas and approaches as much as possible. It does not matter if these some of these new approaches lose a bit of their interrest with time (like fractals).

Aaron, there is history, and then there is History. It just takes some digging. I was never interested in history until I read several novels by Kenneth Roberts. Since then I have always been critical of every thing I read. I look for alternate explanations. Whereas cinci always goes with the general consensus. He can't think for himself. But he is always there to be the arrogant authority. I am real tired of his buttinsky opinions. He just tries to kill any real discussion. It was quite a relief when he was gone for awhile. Maybe he'll be selected to try the new swine flu vaccine.