First U.S. Moon landing real or fake?

[gdogghenrikson]

my friend and I were discussing this one

[TLAM Strike]

All the Apollo flights were observed by thousands of average citizens with normal telescopes in their backyards. The damage (O2 venting) to #13 was even observed. Yes the flights really happened.

EDIT: Laser reflectors were placed by the crews on the moon that still help mesure its distance today IIRC. Also sismographs placed by prevous missions detected the colision of #13's IVB stage on the moon.

[Abraham]

Must have been real. Back in the '70s I saw the launches on TV!

[Torplexed]

The moon hoax conspiracy kooks never explain what America's Cold War rival the Soviet Union was doing in on the con. They sent several unmanned Luna and Zond probes up in the early 1970s. They brought back moon rocks geologically compatable with the ones the astronaunts returned with. Pictures looked a lot the same too. They also never explain why it was neccessary to include a 'failed' mission like Apollo 13 in the grand hoax.

Picture of Lunokhod 1 rover leaving lander October 1971....

[Abraham]

I clearly remember a rocket going up and a few days later its nose cone dropping in the ocean.
Who needs more proof...

[Torplexed]

The woo-woo conspiracy types would claim you staged the take-off and splash-down with fake footage filmed on a movie set inbetween. Ever see the 1977 movie Capricorn One where a corrupt NASA adminstration fakes a Mars landing because it was beyond their technical means?

[Abraham]

So you mean they shoot a rocket with some astronauts on board in the general direction of the moon. They circle the moon but don't land. NASA shoots footage of the astronauts in a studio, pretending to be walking on the moon. A few days later the nose cone splashes back into the ocean and there you have your fake moon landing?
So the astronauts did at least circkle the moon, or were they not in the capsule during launch?

And you repeat that over and over again...?

Sounds like a big waist to me.


P.S.
Let me guess; all the (hundreds of) participants were sworn to secrecy, all the footage is destroyed, etc....
Right?

[Torplexed]

You just summed it up in a nutshell Abraham.

One example: Back in 2001 Fox 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.

Remember...these people have books and videos to sell. They'll push any amount of bad science to do it.

[Theta Sigma]

There are certain things, like the moon landing, JFK and most recently, Flight 93, which have aspects that can be attributed to other causes, or explained by other theories.

Of course, that doesn't mean they're true. Life is like that. Just because no one hears a tree fall in the forest doesn't mean it didn't fall.

Unfortunately, the landings are one of those. The "faked" theory has legs because it would have been easier to fake, and would have looked just as beliveable. Combine that with the fact that the Russians were planning to beat us there, and it begins to become quite plausible. However, that same pressure can explain the developments needed to actually get us there too.

The moon landings were a first for mankind, but we had successfully accomplished space travel already. As such, the moon landings were not that unbeliveable.

So, I believe they happened, but I also believe that there could very well have been such a "Capricorn One" type plan waiting in the wings had the technology not been there in time.

I'm glad they pulled it off. I wouldn't want Buzz pulling his punches.

[micky1up]

i have no doubt that thousands of people watched rockets go up in the air but there far to many anomollies in the pictures taken on the so called landings my fav being 2 landscapes supposedly being from differnt landing areas being exactly the same and the pictue of the astronaught that overlaps the scaling grid that is on the lens of the camera which is an imposibility it was a great bt of propoganda that stopped the russians trying and saved billions on acctually going there

[Skybird]

Just imagine what Philip K. Dick would made of this!

[Skybird]

But there is a kind of contradiction here. It is argued that thousands of people having seen this or that cannot be wrong. Now think of UFOs, radar operators in towers, highly skilled personnell, I mean, those famous 5% or less of sightings that so far noone ever has explained as an atmopheric or otherwise natural phenomenon. Sometimes also thousands of people have seen this event, that sighting, or technicians were able to cinfirm that the radar of that time was fully functional when displaying some kind of strange anomnalies or flight maneuvers no man-made craft ever would be able to perform. The radar sightings often get wiped of the tables as "weather ballons". Weather ballons doing 7000 km/h, and abruptly changing colurse by 90, 130, 180 degrees? Or thiousands may have shared sightings of light symptoms in the air, performing in a comparable fashion: usually here is the talk of military missile exercises, or unknown aTMOSPHERIC WEATHER PHENOMENONS; FAR AWAY BLIZZARDS OR gas from swamps going of in fire.

what I mean is, the argument that "thousands have seen this or that" in case of the moon landing is given that the moon flights took place. In case of UFOs it is wiped off the table.

Imagine the moon flights had been a hoax. then Apollo 13 might have been introduced becasue of the increased realism of a scenario where technology fails.(someone asked for this above).

I personally do not believe the moon flights had been a fake. I do think that a very small percentage of UFO sightings is something true, but that it probably is not of that Hollywood-style nature and origin than UFOlogists usually believe. And they believe very hysterically sometimes, don't they.

[Torplexed]

Originally Posted by micky1up

i have no doubt that thousands of people watched rockets go up in the air but there far to many anomollies in the pictures taken on the so called landings my fav being 2 landscapes supposedly being from differnt landing areas being exactly the same and the pictue of the astronaught that overlaps the scaling grid that is on the lens of the camera which is an imposibility it was a great bt of propoganda that stopped the russians trying and saved billions on acctually going there

Question: why do crosshairs and scaling grids appear behind sunlit white objects on the moon?


Answer: Strong luminosity can washout thin lines.
Test: Hair across lens is washed out by sunlit white paper.
With no atmosphere on the Moon, sunlight is stronger.

In this test a strand of hair was taped across a camcorder lens, which was then pointed at a sunlit white paper. While the test failed to vanish the hair-line completely, it demonstrates that diffuse solar reflection on a white surface can wash out a thin line. This result is sufficient to render the phenomenon of crosshair vanishing over sunlit white objects not anomalous. Also reflective intensity and thus crosshair-knockout potential would be greater on the Moon with no atmosphere to reduce solar intensity.

[STEED]

Another old chestnut did they land on the moon or not this will go on for years. Sorry to say I am with Homer Simpson on this one “Quick change the channel.� I am not interested one bit. :P

[Type941]

it didn't happen.

What was the question?