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Fox TV and the Apollo Moon Hoax
(February 13, 2001)
On Thursday,
February 15th 2001 (and replayed on March 19), the Fox TV network aired
a program called ``Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon?'', hosted
by X-Files actor Mitch Pileggi. The program was an hour long, and featured
interviews with a series of people who believe that NASA faked the Apollo
Moon landings in the 1960s and 1970s. The biggest voice in this is Bill
Kaysing, who claims to have all sorts of hoax evidence, including pictures
taken by the astronauts, engineering details, discussions of physics
and even some testimony by astronauts themselves. The program's conclusion
was that the whole thing was faked in the Nevada desert (in Area 51,
of course!). According to them, NASA did not have the technical capability
of going to the Moon, but pressure due to the Cold War with the Soviet
Union forced them to fake it.
Sound ridiculous?
Of course it does! It is. So let me get this straight right from
the start: this program is an hour long piece of junk.
From the very
first moment to the very last, the program is loaded with bad thinking,
ridiculous suppositions and utterly wrong science. I was able to get
a copy of the show in advance, and although I was expecting it to be
bad, I was still surprised and how awful it was. I took four pages
of notes. I won't subject you to all of that here; it would take hours
to write. I'll only go over some of the major points of the show, and
explain briefly why they are wrong. In the near future, hopefully by
the end of the summer, I will have a much more detailed series of pages
taking on each of the points made by the Hoax Believers (whom I will
call HBs).
So let's take a
look at the ``evidence'' brought out by the show. To make this easier,
below is a table with links to the specific arguments.
Bad:
Right at the beginning, they have a disclaimer:
The following
program deals with a controversial subject. The theories expressed are
not the only possible explanation. Viewers are invited to make a judgement
based on all available information.
Good: The last thing the writers of this program want the viewers
to do is make an informed decision. If they did, they would have given
equal time to both sides of this controversy. Instead, the vast majority
of the time is given to the HBs, with only scattered (and very vague)
dismissive statements by skeptics. So the available information is really
only what they tell you. Of course, there are a lot of websites talking
about this. I have a list of them on my own site.
Bad: The
show claims that 20% of Americans have doubts that we went to the Moon.
Good:
That number is a bit misleading. A
1999 Gallup poll showed it was more like 6%, a number which agrees
with a poll taken in 1995 by Time/CNN. The Gallup website also says:
Although,
if taken literally, 6% translates into millions of individuals, it is
not unusual to find about that many people in the typical poll agreeing
with almost any question that is asked of them -- so the best interpretation
is that this particular conspiracy theory is not widespread.
It also depends on
what you mean by ``doubts''. Does that mean someone who truly doesn't
believe man ever went to the Moon, or just that it's remotely possible
that NASA faked it? Those are very different things. Not only does the
program not say, but they don't say where they found the statistic they
quote either.
Bad: The
program talks about the movie ``Capricorn 1'', an entertaining if ultimately
silly movie about how NASA must fake a manned Mars expedition. The program
says ``The Apollo footage [from the surface of the Moon] is strikingly
similar to the scenes in ``Capricorn 1''.
Good: Is
it just an amazing coincidence that the actual Moon images look like
the movie, or is it evidence of conspiracy? Neither! The movie
was filmed in 1978, many years after the last man walked on the
Moon. The movie was made to look like the real thing! This statement
by the program is particularly ludicrous, and indicates just how far
the producers were willing to go to make a sensational program.
Bad:
The first bit of actual evidence brought up is the lack of stars in the
pictures taken by the Apollo astronauts from the surface of the Moon.
Without air, the sky is black, so where are the stars?
Good: The
stars are there! They're just too faint to be seen.
This is usually
the first thing HBs talk about when discussing the Hoax. That amazes
me, as it's the silliest assertion they make. However, it appeals to
our common sense: when the sky is black here on Earth, we see stars.
Therefore we should see them from the Moon as well.
I'll say this here
now, and return to it many times: the Moon is not the Earth. Conditions
there are weird, and our common sense is likely to fail us.
The Moon's surface
is airless. On Earth, our thick atmosphere scatters sunlight, spreading
it out over the whole sky. That's why the sky is bright during the day.
Without sunlight, the air is dark at night, allowing us to see stars.
On the Moon, the
lack of air means that the sky is dark. Even when the Sun is high off
the horizon during full day, the sky near it will be black. If you were
standing on the Moon, you would indeed see stars, even during the day.
So why aren't they
in the Apollo pictures? Pretend for a moment you are an astronaut on
the surface of the Moon. You want to take a picture of your fellow space
traveler. The Sun is low off the horizon, since all the lunar landings
were done at local morning. How do you set your camera? The lunar landscape
is brightly lit by the Sun, of course, and your friend is wearing a
white spacesuit also brilliantly lit by the Sun. To take a picture of
a bright object with a bright background, you need to set the exposure
time to be fast, and close down the aperture setting too; that's like
the pupil in your eye constricting to let less light in when you walk
outside on a sunny day.
So the picture you
take is set for bright objects. Stars are faint objects! In the
fast exposure, they simply do not have time to register on the film.
It has nothing to do with the sky being black or the lack of air, it's
just a matter of exposure time. If you were to go outside here on Earth
on the darkest night imaginable and take a picture with the exact
same camera settings the astronauts used, you won't see any stars!
It's that
simple. Remember, this the usually the first and strongest argument the
HBs use, and it was that easy to show wrong. Their arguments get worse
from here.
Bad: In the
pictures taken of the lunar lander by the astronauts, the TV show continues,
there is no blast crater. A rocket capable of landing on the Moon should
have burned out a huge crater on the surface, yet there is nothing there.
Good: When
someone driving a car pulls into a parking spot, do they do it at 100
kilometers per hour? Of course not. They slow down first, easing off
the accelerator. The astronauts did the same thing. Sure, the rocket
on the lander was capable of 10,000 pounds of thrust, but they had
a throttle. They fired the rocket hard to deorbit and slow enough
to land on the Moon, but they didn't need to thrust that hard as they
approached the lunar surface; they throttled down to about 3000 pounds
of thrust. Now
here comes a little bit of math: the engine nozzle was about 54 inches
across (from the Encyclopaedia Astronautica), which means it had
an area of 2300 square inches. That in turn means that the thrust generated
a pressure of only about 1.5 pounds per square inch! That's not a lot
of pressure. Moreover, in a vacuum, the exhaust from a rocket spreads
out very rapidly. On Earth, the air in our atmosphere constrains the thrust
of a rocket into a narrow column, which is why you get long flames and
columns of smoke from the back of a rocket. In a vacuum, no air means
the exhaust spreads out even more, lowering the pressure. That's why there's
no blast crater! Three thousand pounds of thrust sounds like a lot, but
it was so spread out it was actually rather gentle.
[Note added December 6, 2001: Originally in this section I said that
the engines also cut off early, before the moment of touchdown, to prevent
dust from getting blown around and disturbing the astronauts' view of
the surface. This was an incorrect assertion; it was known that dust
would blow around before the missions were launched, and steps were
taken to make sure the astronauts knew their height above the surface.
Anyway, the incorrect section has been removed.]
Bad: The
next argument presented on the show deals with the lunar dust. As the
lander descended, we clearly see dust getting blown away by the rocket.
The exhaust should have blown all the dust away, yet we can clearly
see the astronauts' footprints in the dust mere meters from the lander.
Obviously, when NASA faked this they messed it up.
Good: Once
again, the weird alien environment of the Moon comes to play. Imagine
taking a bag of flour and dumping it onto your kitchen floor (kids:
ask your folks first!). Now bend over the pile, take a deep breath,
and blow into it as hard as you can. Poof! Flour goes everywhere. Why?
Because the momentum of your breath goes into the flour, which makes
it move. But note that the flour goes up, and sideways, and aloft into
the air. If you blow hard enough, you might see little curlicues of
air lifting the flour farther than your breath alone could have, and
doing so to dust well outside of where your breath actually blew.
That's the heart
of this problem. We are used to air helping us blow things around. The
air itself is displaced by your breath, which pushed on more air, and
so on. On the Earth, your breath might blow flour that was dozens of
centimeters away, even though your actual breath didn't reach that far.
On the Moon, there is no air. The only dust that gets blown around by
the exhaust of the rocket (which, remember, isn't nearly as strong as
the HBs claim) is the dust physically touched by the exhaust,
or dust hit by other bits of flying dust. In the end, only the dust
directly under or a bit around the rocket was blown out by the exhaust.
The rest was left where it was. Ironically, the dust around the landing
site was probably a bit thicker than before, since the dust blown
out would have piled up there. I
can't resist: another Hoax Believer argument bites the dust.
Bad: The
next evidence also involves pictures. In all the pictures taken by the
astronauts, the shadows are not black. Objects in shadow can be seen,
sometimes fairly clearly, including a plaque on the side of the lander
that can be read easily. If the Sun is the only source of light on the
Moon, the HBs say, and there is no air to scatter that light, shadows
should be utterly black.
Good: This
is one of my favorite HB claims. They give you the answer in the claim
itself: "...if the Sun is the only source of light..." It isn't.
Initially, I thought the Earth was bright enough to fill in the shadows,
but subsequently realized that cannot be the case. The Earth is a fraction
of the brightness of the Sun, not nearly enough to fill in the shadows.
So then what is that other light source?
The answer is: The
Moon itself. Surprise! The lunar dust has a peculiar property: it tends
to reflect light back in the direction from where it came. So if you
were to stand on the Moon and shine a flashlight at the surface, you
would see a very bright spot where the light hits the ground, but, oddly,
someone standing a bit to the side would hardly see it at all. The light
is preferentially reflected back toward the flashlight (and therefore
you), and not the person on the side.
Now think about
the sunlight. Let's say the sun is off to the right in a picture. It
is illuminating the right side of the lander, and the left is in shadow.
However, the sunlight falling beyond the lander on the left is being
reflected back toward the Sun. That light hits the surface and reflects
to the right and up, directly onto the shadowed part of the lander.
In other words, the lunar surface is so bright that it easily lights
up the shadows of vertical surfaces.
This effect
is called heiligenschein (the German word for halo). You can find some
neat images of it at here, for example. This also explains another HB claim,
that many times the astronauts appear to be standing in a spotlight.
This is a natural effect of heiligenschein. You can reproduce this effect
yourself; wet grass on a cool morning will do it. Face away from the
Sun and look at the shadow of your head. There will be a halo around
it. The effect is also very strong in fine, disturbed dust like that
in a baseball diamond infield. Or, of course, on the Moon.
The Credable Questions:
1> General
Questions when ? why ? & how it happened......
2> Is
it impossible to travel to the Moon, because of the Van Allen Belt?
3> Scientific
Explanations to the questions ( must read)
4> What
NASA has to say.....
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[Note added June
29, 2001: A nifty demonstration of the shadow filling was done by
Ian Goddard and can be found here. His demos are great, and really
drive the point home.
Bad: Another
argument by the HBs deals with shadows. Several photos from the Moon
are shown where objects on the lunar landscape have long shadows. If
the Sun were the only light source, the program claims, the shadows
should be parallel. The shadows are not parallel, and therefore the
images are fake.
Good: This
is an interesting claim on the part of the HBs, because on the surface
(haha) it seems to make sense. However, let's assume the shadows are
not parallel. One explanation is that there are (at least) two light
sources, and that is certainly what many HBs are trying to imply. So
if there are multiple light sources, where are the multiple shadows?
Each object casts one shadow, so there can only be one light source.
Another
explanation is that the light source is close to the objects; then it
would also cast non-parallel shadows. However, a distant source can as
well! In this case, the Sun really is the only source of light. The shadows
are not parallel in the images because of perspective. Remember, you are
looking at a three-dimensional scene, projected on a two-dimensional photograph.
That causes distortions. When the Sun is low and shadows are long, objects
at different distance do indeed appear to cast non-parallel shadows, even
here on Earth. An example of that can
be found at another debunking site. The scene (near the bottom of
the above-linked page) shows objects with non-parallel shadows, distorted
by perspective. If seen from above, all the shadows in the Apollo images
would indeed look parallel. You can experience this for yourself; go outside
on a clear day when the Sun is low in the sky and compare the direction
of the shadows of near and far objects. You'll see that they appear to
diverge. Here is a major claim of the HBs that you can disprove all by
yourself! Don't take my word for it, go out and try!
Incidentally,
the bright Earth in the sky will also cast shadows, but those would
be very faint compared to the ones made by the Sun. So in a sense there
are multiple shadows, but like not being able to see stars, the shadows
are too faint to be seen against the very bright lunar surface. Again,
you can test this yourself: go outside during full Moon and you'll see
your shadow. Then walk over to a streetlamp. The light from the streetlamp
will wash out the shadow cast by the Moon. You might still be able to
see it faintly, but it would difficult against the much brighter landscape.
[Note added June
29, 2001: Again, check out Ian Goddard's work for more about this.
Bad: The
program has two segments dealing with what they call ``identical backgrounds''.
In one, they show the lunar lander with a mountain in the background.
They then show another picture of the same mountain, but no lander in
the foreground at all. The astronauts could not have taken either picture
before landing, of course, and after it lifts off the lander leaves
the bottom section behind. Therefore, there would have been something
in the second image no matter what, and the foreground could not be
empty. Obviously, the mountain background is a fake set, and was reused
by NASA for another shot.
Good: Actually,
the pictures are real, of course. As always, repeat after me: the Moon
is not the Earth. On the Earth, distant objects are obscured a bit by
haze in the air, and we use that to mentally gauge distances. However,
with no air, an object can be very far away on the Moon and still be
crisp and sharp to the eye. You can't tell if a boulder is a meter across
and 100 meters away, or 100 meters across and 10 kilometers away! That's
what's going on here. The lander is close to the astronaut in the first
picture, perhaps a 20 or 30 meters away. The mountain is kilometers away.
For the second picture, the astronaut merely moved a few hundred meters
to the side. The lander was then out of the picture, but the mountain
hardly moved at all! If you look at the scene carefully, you'll see that
all the rocks and craters in the foreground changes between the two pictures,
just as you'd expect if the astronaut had moved to the side a ways between
the two shots. It's not fraud, it's parallax!
Another example
of the difficulty in estimating distance is due to the shapes of the
rocks on the Moon. A rock small enough to sit down on doesn't look fundamentally
different from one bigger than your house. Humans also judge distance
by using the relative sizes of objects. We know how big a person is,
or a tree, so the apparent size of the object can be used to
estimate the distance. If we don't know how big the object is, we can
be fooled about its distance.
For an outstanding
example of this, take a look at video
taken during Apollo 16. There is a boulder in the background that
looks to be about 3 or 4 meters (10-13 feet) high. About 3/4 of the
way through the segment the astronauts walk over to it. Amazingly, that
boulder is the size of a large house! Without knowing how big the rock
was when we first see it, we have no way to judge distances. That huge
rock looks like a medium sized one until we have some way to directly
judge its size; in this case, by looking at the tiny astronauts next
to it. [My thanks to Bad Reader Martin Michalak for bringing
this video to my attention. My very special thanks goes to Charlie
Duke (yes, the Charlie Duke, Apollo astronaut and lunar lander
pilot) who emailed me (!) about the difficulty in judging distances
due to not knowing the sizes of rocks.]
I will admit the
Fox program had me for a while on this one; I couldn't figure it out.
But then I got a note from Bad Reader David Bailey, who set me straight.
However, the producers of the show should have talked to some real
experts before saying such a silly thing as this. If they had checked
with the folks who run the Apollo Lunar
Surface Journal, for example, they would have been set straight
too.
NEW!
(February 19, 2001): I found a site that has
an animation where the two images of the mountain are superimposed.
You need Flash for it, but it's a great animation. The beauty of it
is that you can see changes in the mountain range due to parallax!.
In other words, this animation is support that the images are real and
are not using a fake backdrop. The real beauty of this animation is
that the person who put it together is an HB. I like the irony of linking
to that animation and using it to show that it is indeed evidence that
Apollo did go to the Moon. I love the web!
Bad: The
other ``identical background'' segment shows an astronaut on a hilltop.
A second video shows two astronauts on the same hill (and this time
it really is the same hill), and claims that NASA itself says these
two videos were taken on two different hills separated by many kilometers.
How can this be? They are obviously the same hill, so NASA must be lying!
Good: Never
attribute to malice what you can attribute to a mistake. A videotape
about Apollo 16 ironically titled ``Nothing So Hidden...'' released
by NASA does indeed make that claim, but in this case it looks to me
to be a simple error. I asked Eric Jones, who is the editor of the Apollo
Lunar Surface Journal, and he told me those two clips were taken about
three minutes apart. Eric's assistant, Ken Glover, uncovered this problem.
He sent me this transcript (which I edited a bit to make links to the
video clips) of the Fox show with his comments, which I will highlight
in red:
Narrator:
Background discrepancies are also apparent in the lunar video.
[...] [Video
showing John Young at Station 4 on EVA-2, with Fox caption "Day One".
Click here for the transcript and here for the RealVideo
clip.]
Narrator: This shot was taped
in what was purported to be the first of Apollo 16's lunar excursions.
[Audio
of John Young dubbed over clip: "Well, I couldn't pick a better spot",
actual MET of 123:58:46]
[Next, video of
John Young and Charlie Duke at Station 4, EVA-2. In reality, about three
minutes after the first clip. Fox caption "Day Two". Click here for the transcript and here for the RealVideo
clip.] Narrator:
And this video was from the next day, at a different location.
[Audio
of Charlie Duke dubbed over clip: "That is the most beautiful sight!",
actual MET of 124:03:01]
Narrator: NASA claims
the second location was two-and-a-half miles away, but when one video
was superimposed over the other the locations appear identical.
[Audio
of John Young dubbed over "Day Two" video: " It's absolutely unreal!",
actual MET 144:16:30]
Narrator: Conspiracy
theorists claim that even closer examination of the photos suggest evidence
of doctoring.
That last line is
pretty funny. The audio you hear of the astronauts in those clips was
actually all from different times than the video!
So that's why the
hill looks the same. It's the same hill, and the two clips were not
taken a day apart, but from three minutes apart or so. Again, had the
program producers bothered to check their sources, they would have received
a prompt answer. That's all I did: I emailed the editor of the ALSJ.
It was pretty easy to do, and he answered me in minutes.
Bad: Ralph
Rene, a self-proclaimed physicist, claims that the astronauts shifting
in the cabin would change the center of mass, throwing the lunar lander
off balance. They couldn't compensate for this, which would have crashed
the lander. Thus, the landing was faked. Good:
Rene is wrong. Evidently he doesn't know how the internet works either,
because there is a website which describes how the attitude control was
maintained on the lander during descent and ascent; it's the Apollo
Saturn Reference page. There was a feedback control system on board
the lander which determined if the axis were shifting. During descent,
the engine nozzle could shift direction slightly to compensate for changes
in the center of gravity of the lander (the technical term for this is
gimbaling the nozzle). During ascent, the engine nozzle was fixed
in position, so there was a series of smaller rockets which was used to
maintain the proper attitude. Incidentally, every rocket needs to do this
since fuel shifts the center of gravity as it is burned up by the rocket,
yet Rene and the other HBs don't seem to doubt that rockets themselves
work! So we have a case of selective thinking on the part of the HBs.
[Note (July 20, 2001):
My thanks again to Apollo astronaut Charlie Duke for correcting a technical
error in a previous version of this section. After describing the above
scenario to me, he said the ascent stage of the lander was "a sporty
ride".]
Bad: The
program claims that when the top half of the lander took off from the
Moon to bring the astronauts back into orbit, there was no flame from
the rocket. Obviously, every rocket has a visible flame, so the takeoff
was faked. Good:
There is actually a simple reason why you cannot see the flame from the
lander when it took off. The fuels they used produced no visible flame!
The lander used a mix of hydrazine and dinitrogen tetroxide (an oxidizer).
These two chemicals ignite upon contact and produce a product that is
transparent. That's why you cannot see the flame. We expect to see a flame
because of the usual drama of liftoff from the Earth; the flame and smoke
we see from the Shuttle, for example, is because the solid rocket boosters
do actually produce them, while the lunar lander did not. Here
is a brief webpage describing this. Note too that fuels like this
are still used today, and indeed rockets in space produce little or no
visible flame.
I
heard an account that the cameras used for the ascent of the lander
were fairly primitive, even for that era (this is usually the case in
space travel, where it takes extensive testing to make sure things work
properly; during that time the state of the art advances). Even if it
were visible, the flash of the exhaust may have easily been missed
by those cameras.
[Note added April
9, 2001: My original assertion about not seeing the flame was because
the Moon has no air, and we see flame from rockets on Earth because
we have an atmosphere. This does have some effect (the pressure of air
constrains the rocket exhaust and helps produce the effect we see) but
the larger reason the flame is invisible is due to the fuel used. I
gratefully thank the dozens of people who sent me email about this.]
Bad: When
the movies of the astronauts walking and driving the lunar rover are
doubled in speed, they look just like they were filmed on Earth and
slowed down. This is clearly how the movies were faked.
Good: This
was the first new bit I have seen from the HBs, and it's funny. To me
even when sped up, the images didn't look like they were filmed in Earth's
gravity. The astronauts were sidling down a slope, and they looked weird
to me, not at all like they would on Earth. I will admit that if wires
were used, the astronauts' gait could be simulated.
However, not the
rover! If you watch the clip, you will see dust thrown up by the wheels
of the rover. The dust goes up in a perfect parabolic arc and falls
back down to the surface. Again, the Moon isn't the Earth! If this were
filmed on the Earth, which has air, the dust would have billowed up
around the wheel and floated over the surface. This clearly does not
happen in the video clips; the dust goes up and right back down. It's
actually a beautiful demonstration of ballistic flight in a vacuum.
Had NASA faked this shot, they would have had to have a whole set (which
would have been very large) with all the air removed. We don't
have this technology today! This
is another case of selective vision on the part of the HBs.
Bad: When
the astronauts are assembling the American flag, the flag waves. Kaysing
says this must have been from an errant breeze on the set. A flag wouldn't
wave in a vacuum.
Good: Of
course a flag can wave in a vacuum. In the shot of the astronaut
and the flag, the astronaut is rotating the pole on which the flag is
mounted, trying to get it to stay up. The flag is mounted on one side
on the pole, and along the top by another pole that sticks out to the
side. In a vacuum or not, when you whip around the vertical pole, the
flag will ``wave'', since it is attached at the top. The top will move
first, then the cloth will follow along in a wave that moves down. This
isn't air that is moving the flag, it's the cloth itself. New
stuff added March 1, 2001: Many HBs show a picture of an astronaut
standing to one side of the flag, which still has a ripple in it (for
example, see this famous image). The astronaut is not touching
the flag, so how can it wave?
The answer is, it
isn't waving. It looks like that because of the way the flag
was deployed. The flag hangs from a horizontal rod which telescopes
out from the vertical one. In Apollo 11, they couldn't get the rod to
extend completely, so the flag didn't get stretched fully. It has a
ripple in it, like a curtain that is not fully closed. In later flights,
the astronauts didn't fully deploy it on purpose because they
liked the way it looked. In other words, the flag looks like it is
waving because the astronauts wanted it to look that way. Ironically,
they did their job too well. It appears to have fooled a lot of people
into thinking it waved.
This explanation
comes from NASA's wonderful spaceflight web page. For those of you who are conspiracy
minded, of course, this doesn't help because it comes from a NASA site.
But it does explain why the flag looks as it does, and you will be hard
pressed to find a video of the flag waving. And if it was a mistake
caused by a breeze on the set where they faked this whole thing, don't
you think the director would have tried for a second take? With all
the money going to the hoax, they could afford the film!
Note added March
28, 2001: One more thing. Several readers have pointed out that
if the flag is blowing in a breeze, why don't we see dust blowing around
too? Somehow, the HBs' argument gets weaker the more you think about
it.
Bad: The
program makes a big deal out of how well the pictures taken from the
Moon were exposed and set. Every picture we see is just right, with
the scene always centered perfectly. However, the cameras were mounted
on the front of the astronauts' spacesuit, and there was no finder.
They couldn't have taken perfect pictures every time!
Good ...
and of course, no one claims they did. Thousands of pictures were taken
on the Moon, and the ones you see will tend to be the good ones. If
Buzz Aldrin accidentally cut off Neil Armstrong's head, you probably
won't see that image in a magazine. Also, everything done on
the Moon was practiced endlessly by the astronauts. The people working
on the mission knew that these pictures would be some of the most important
images ever taken, so they would have taken particular care in making
sure the astronauts could do it cold. When fabled astronaut Story Musgrave
replaced a camera on board the Hubble Space Telescope in 1993, someone
commented that he made it look easy. "Sure," he replied, "I had practiced
it thousands of times!" The
program goes farther than this, though: they actually contacted the man
who designed the cameras for the astronauts. When they asked him why the
pictures were always perfect, he hemmed and hawed, and finally admitted
he had no answer for that. This is hardly evidence that NASA must have
faked the missions. All it means is that he couldn't think of anything
while sitting on camera! I think this is pretty evil of the program producers
to do this; a bit of editing on their part makes it looks like they completely
baffled an expert.
Bad: Crosshairs
were etched in the astronauts' cameras to better help measure objects
in the pictures. However, in several images, it looks like the objects
are actually in front of the crosshairs, which is impossible if the
crosshairs were inside the camera! Therefore, the images were faked.
Good: This
argument is pretty silly. Do the HBs think that NASA had painted crosshairs
on the set behind the astronauts? I heard one HB claim the crosshairs
were added later on, and NASA had messed up some of the imaging. That's
ridiculous! Why add in crosshairs later? Cameras equipped with crosshairs
have been used for a long time, and it would have been easy to simply
use some to take pictures on the faked set. Clearly, the HBs are wrong
here, but the images do look funny. What happened?
What happened becomes
clearer when you look more closely at the images. The times it looks
like an object is in front of the crosshair (because the crosshair looks
blocked by the object) is when the object photographed is white. The
crosshair is black. Have you ever taken an image that is overexposed?
White parts bleed into the film around them, making them look white
too. That's all that happened here; the white object in the image ``fills
in'' the black crosshair. It's a matter of contrast: the crosshair becomes
invisible because the white part overwhelms the film. This is basic
photography.
[Note (added
February 18, 2001): I have been informed by David Percy, a photographer
quoted in the Fox show, that he does indeed believe that man went to
the Moon, but he believes there are anomalies in the imagery taken which
``put into question many aspects of the missions'', which is a different
matter. While I disagree that there are anomalies, I have edited out
what is essentially a personal attack on Mr. Percy that I had here originally.
It is an easy matter to let one's emotions get carried away when writing
these essays, and I apologize to him and my readers for letting that
get in. I make it a policy to correct Bad Astronomy based on facts,
not personalities.] [Note
added June 29, 2001: Again, Ian Goddard's work has more about this, including images
that show how crosshairs can fade out in a bright background.
Bad: A big
staple of the HBs is the claim that radiation in the van Allen Belts
and in deep space would have killed the astronauts in minutes. They
interview a Russian cosmonaut involved in the USSR Moon program, who
says that they were worried about going in to the unknowns of space,
and suspected that radiation would have penetrated the hull of the spacecraft.
Good: Kaysing's
exact words in the program are ``Any human being traveling through the
van Allen belt would have been rendered either extremely ill or actually
killed by the radiation within a short time thereof.'' This
is complete and utter nonsense. The van Allen belts are regions above
the Earth's surface where the Earth's magnetic field has trapped particles
of the solar wind. An unprotected man would indeed get a lethal dose of
radiation, if he stayed there long enough. Actually, the spaceship
traveled through the belts pretty quickly, getting past them in an hour
or so. There simply wasn't enough time to get a lethal dose, and, as a
matter of fact, the metal hull of the spaceship did indeed block most
of the radiation. For a detailed explanation of all this, my fellow Mad
Scientist William Wheaton has a page with the technical data about the
doses received by the astronauts. Another excellent page about this,
that also gives a history of NASA radiation testing, is from the Biomedical Results of Apollo site. An interesting read!
It was also disingenuous
of the program to quote the Russian cosmonaut as well. Of course they
were worried about radiation before men had gone into the van Allen
belts! But tests done by NASA showed that it was possible to not only
survive such a passage, but to not even get harmed much by it. It looks
to me like another case of convenient editing by the producers of the
program.
Very, very Bad:
Kaysing says that the Apollo 1 fire that killed Roger Chaffee, Ed White
and Gus Grissom was no accident. Grissom was ready to talk to the press
about the Moon hoax, so NASA killed him. Kaysing says NASA also killed
other people who were about to blow the whistle as well. This
is so disgusting I have a hard time writing a coherent reply. Kaysing
has no grasp of basic physics, photography or even common sense, but he
accuses NASA of killing people to shut them up. That is a particularly
loathsome accusation.
The utter bilge
pumped out in this program goes on and on, and indeed, if you go to
the HBs websites you can read more than any brain can handle. I have
read literally dozens of things that ``prove'' the landings were faked,
and each one is rather easily shown to be wrong by anyone with experience
in such things. I think the problem here is twofold: we tend to want
to believe (or at least listen to) conspiracy theories, and this one
is a whopper. Also, the evidence is presented in such a way that, if
you are unfamiliar with the odd nature of the vacuum of space and of
space travel, it sounds reasonable.
But it isn't reasonable.
Their evidence is actually as tenuous as the vacuum of space itself.
I find it amazing that they are so willing to scrutinize every available
frame of data from the astronauts, yet miss the most obvious thing right
in front of them. Fox television and the producers of this program should
be ashamed of themselves. Even worse, the Fox Family Channel broadcast
a show just last year that was skeptical and even handed about the Moon
Hoax! Amazingly, Mitch Pileggi hosted that program as well.
I'll end this on
one more bit the HBs don't talk about. When Jim Lovell, two time Apollo
astronaut and commander of the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission, was told
about Kaysing's claims, Lovell called him a kook. Kaysing, ever the
rational thinker, sued Lovell for slander. Imagine: Kaysing, who says
that NASA murdered three men outright and arranged for the murders of
others, sued Commander James Lovell for slander! After some time, a
judge wisely threw the case out of court. There's
still hope.
Links
- There are many
websites about the Moon Hoax where you can read both the theories
by the HBs themselves or what reality is like as told by people debunking
the theory. I have a list of them on my Bad
Misconceptions page.
- [Note added
February 23, 2001: the link for the USA Today article is now gone,
so I have removed it.] Dan Vergano of USA Today had an article (with
an interview of me) about the TV show on the USA Today website. The
print version was in the Friday, February 16th 2001 edition.
- Conspiracy Theorist
Clyde Lewis has a website ready to believe you! But I wouldn't believe
him.
FALLOUT FROM THE
SHOW
February 17, 2001:
Well, the Fox Apollo show has struck a chord, it appears. I am receiving
a lot of email from people, both for and against. The most noteworthy
support was quite a surprise: NASA
itself! That explains why I am getting tens of thousands of hits to
this site. Another site linking here is Ground Zero, a rather typical hoax and conspiracy site
that calls me ``an annoyed scientist'' (true enough) and says that people
call me a ``weapon for science''. I kinda like the sound of that one!
What's funny though
is how that site pulls out the same tired arguments that are easy to
show wrong, yet stands by them dogmatically. For example, Clyde Lewis,
the webmaster of the site, shows a photo of the flag waving and asks
how it can be waving; I already showed how it can appear to wave on
this page earlier. In his image, the bottom corner of the flag is not
flat, which is most likely simply residual rippling from the astronaut's
twisting the pole. Remember, without air, there is nothing to
dampen the rippling, so the flag actually can appear to wave as if from
a breeze for a few moments.
This is hardly evidence
of a hoax. Lewis goes on and on, bringing out the radiation arguments,
the no stars arguments, on and on, like these are either new or damning,
when they are neither.
Of course, I am
trying to debunk the conspiracy theorists, but unlike them, I want people
to look at their evidence rationally and critically, and not swallow
it whole. It'll choke you if you do.
Finally, one last
note: If I weren't a hard-headed scientist, I'd wonder if some cosmic
force were at work sometimes. I went to a website that creates anagrams, that is, rearranges letters in
a word to spell other words. I put in "The Bad Astronomer", and one
of the anagrams was MOON TRASH DEBATER. I think that's pretty
cool.
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