18 November 2014
The Short Answer (TSA)
On July 20, 1969, Apollo 11 entered lunar orbit. Two
astronauts descended to the surface of the moon landing in the Sea of Tranquility.
Six hours later, Neil Armstrong stepped out of Lunar Module and took the first
steps on the moon.
But in 2001, a poll taken by the Fox network revealed that
one out of five respondents, about 20%, didn’t believe this event ever
happened.
That’s a bit of credibility gap.
A small but determined group of people assert that no manned
mission has ever reached the moon. The U.S., it is claimed, faked the
1969 moon landing something like the events presented in a fictional novel and
film, Capricorn One, in
which NASA claims to have launched astronauts on a mission to Mars. In
fact (or, rather, in fiction), the “astronauts” remain right here on Earth
where they work on a sound-stage participating in the filming of a fake
landing on the red planet.
The lunar landing skeptics are divided into two
groups. One group believes that no manned mission has ever reached the
Moon. All the Apollo missions, in which a landing was said to
have occurred, were faked by filming the supposed lunar sojourn on a
sound-stage and presenting the film to the world as a real series of events.
Another group of skeptics believes that the 1969 landing was
faked, but subsequent missions were real. Apparently, NASA needed to
spend fantastic amounts of time, energy, and money primarily to spread around
false evidence to cover up the fact that there really had never been a Moon
landing in 1969.
In fact, the itemized list of anomalies that believers, or
rather “disbelievers,” offer as proof is a long one. Almost all of the evidence
centers around the photographs taken while the astronauts were on the moon.
Actually, most all of evidence of a “faked moon landing” can
be explained and refuted – and has been – most comprehensively in an episode of
the television series Myth Busters, in which Matt and Jamie go
through most of the supposed “anomalies” and present pretty convincing
explanations.
But the believers in the “faked moon landing” were “on a
roll” for a while. In fact, there was a comedy of errors long and funny enough
to bear reviewing.
First, a “moon rock” in a Dutch museum was found to be a
piece of petrified wood from right here on earth. The rock was traced to an Ex
Dutch Prime Minister who remembered having received the rock as a gift during
an official visit by the Apollo 11 astronauts. After the visit, the
Dutch official donated the moon rock to the museum.
When NASA was contacted for authentication, the agency
revealed that no records of moon rocks had ever been kept. At the
time, the agency believed that, with more missions, moon rocks would become so
common that they would be nearly valueless. So, without any records, we
can’t really be sure where the original rocks are. The moon rock evidence
seemed . . . questionable.
When investigators sought the original films and video tapes
of the missions, NASA explained that they had all been accidentally
destroyed. All originals and all copies. And not just
the tapes of the Apollo 11 mission, but the tapes of all the manned missions to
the Moon.
Then, NASA sought to fill the void by obtaining the original
news feed videos from CBS News. These would have been more convincing if the
agency hadn’t immediately sent the tapes to Hollywood to be enhanced (altered).
Still, in 1969, computer generated special effects were far
in the future. The question remained: How could anyone have faked the footage
of the moon landing?
Well, it just so happened that a film director had recently
consulted with NASA in the making of a film: 2001
– A Space Odyssey. In that film, director Stanley Kubrick’s most
amazing special effect technique, front screen projection, was used to simulate
numerous scenes of astronauts walking on the surface of the moon.
While all this begins to sound worse and worse, in fact, the
theory of Kubrick’s involvement unraveled quickly. Not only did the
director himself, co-workers, friends and family convincing deny his
involvement, but the lunar surface scenes in 2001 really don’t resemble the photographs and
tapes of the astronauts on the Moon.
But, amazingly, though the facts don’t seem to support the
theories, the believers in the “faked moon landing” go marching on. The
“legend” of Kubrick’s filming of a fake moon landing has not only survived, but
developed into a further theory that the director “confessed” his involvement
in “the greatest deception in history” by leaving clues in a subsequent film,
The
Shining. A later film
, Room 237, carefully
elucidates “the clues inserted” into the earlier film.
So, not withstanding all the evidence to the contrary, the
belief that, at least, the 1969 moon landing was faked, goes marching on.
A final suggestion: One way or another, the “waxing and
waning” of the numbers of believers in the moon landing conspiracy may, in the
end, have more to do with a perceived credibility gap between a people and their
government than about whether or not men ever walked on the moon.
Wikipedia gives an extremely good account the debate:
M Grossmann of Hazelwood, Missouri &Belleville, Illinois
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