And No, The Earth is Not Flat!
The Setup: My lovely wife Astrid likes to get into work early, the theory being that the earlier she begins, the earlier she can come home to her loving husband and son. This means our first alarm (we have three set most weekdays) goes off at 4:30 AM Pacific time, while she usually doesn't get up much before five. This means we can lie in bed for a few minutes each morning listening to her favorite radio station. The show they have running at that ungodly hour is the immensely popular "AM Coast To Coast." Proving that just because something is popular doesn't necessarily mean it's any good (see my comments on BMW automobiles), this show is populated with an amazing array of ghost hunters, UFOlogists, conspiracy theorists, and genuine card-carrying whack-jobs. One such was evident this last Tuesday morning. It seems this bizarre nut-case, in the finest anti-American tradition, was trying to insist that the Apollo moon landings never occurred, and were instead a massive Government cover-up. Now normally, I just snicker at such stupidity, but this got my back up a mite. One reason might be that I wept openly when, at the age of 12, I grew past the height of 5 feet 8 inches, which at the time was the absolute upper limit of height for astronauts. Yes, that's right, Duke's a closet astronaut wanna-be!
I could have ignored the idiot, but he's put together what he claims is a documentary proving his thesis. It's sold from a website (www.moonmovie.com) that purports to present supporting evidence. Naturally, I looked it all over, snickered at the pseudo-scientific claptrap, and wrote him one of my patented acid-dipped e-mails debunking his claims point-by-point. Here's what I sent him (as he won't have the guts to put it on his site, I'll put it on mine, and let the truth speak for itself):
In 1976, I attended a lecture at UCLA by a member of the Flat Earth Society. He insisted, despite the obvious physical and scientific evidence to the contrary, that we were all mistaken and the Earth was indeed flat. I've reviewed the contents of your website, and place it firmly in this class of self-delusion. Now, admittedly, I'm a science buff, and I have worn Gus Grissom's backup space suit, and I have been around mock-ups of the Lunar Module (LM) and Command Module (CM), but all the things you point out as "proof" are obvious to even the average person as either ignorance of reality or willful misstatement.
Me, I suspect the latter. Why? The statements made on the site and on the air show a clearly liberal political and anti-scientific bent. If the reference to "Tricky Dick" in your list of "15 Hints" wasn't a dead giveaway, the statement during the broadcast that "the money spent on this program could have built...millions of two bedroom homes" certainly made it clear. By the way, where would you put those several million homes -- Death Valley? Certainly no place with infrastructure or jobs.
Let's go over some of those 15 Reasons, shall we? Let's start with:
#15: Beyond your obvious non-understanding of Nixon (full disclosure: I live in Yorba Linda, Nixon's home town, and can easily tell you don't understand his cultural milieu -- or don't want to), three-quarters of the build-up to Apollo was done under Democrat presidents. If there's any hiding being done, could it be the same people who cheated their way into the White House in 1960 thanks to the Chicago Daleys (just as they tried again in 2000)?
#14: The whole Moon Mission thing was America's love letter to Jack Kennedy. The REAL war distraction setup was the Ecology movement. Once the Vietnam war ended, so did the movement. Trust me, I was there when the money dried up. All those committed recyclers went away to do something else (probably fixing more elections). Please bear in mind that I was around for the Vietnam War, as I was for the Moon landings. There was no "near revolt," just as there was no "insurrection" during the LA Riots. Just saying it's so doesn't make it so. The problem with revisionist theories is that there are far too many people still alive who remember the truth. Perhaps in another 50 years, you'll be able to sell this nonsense as reality, but right now, you're considered a crackpot by anybody with any semblance of scientific training.
#13: No argument with any of these. They started out ahead (their captured Nazis were apparently better than our captured Nazis). They didn't stay there. Seems our computers were better than theirs (and our wristwatches, too). Their propaganda machine, however, apparently still has adherents on this side of the pond.
#12: If Neil Armstrong wants to be left alone, who are we to say otherwise? If it was good enough for Garbo, perhaps it should be good enough for him as well. As for Aldrin, I've met the man, and he's a very kind and levelheaded fellow. Something had to have been done to him to get that kind of reaction. From the angle of the shot, it appears the video is from a concealed camera. If I'd been treated so cavalierly, the photographer and interviewer would not have left the room under their own power. From that point of view, I suspect Aldrin showed great restraint.
#11: The "retouching" of this photo consisted of cutting the resolution by roughly 80% (note the loss of detail in the soil behind the rock). As for the big letter C in the first version, I seem to recall pictures of a very large face on the surface of Mars. Of course, it's not really a face, and the natural features of this rock were not shaped by human hands. Of course, we can't be sure one of the astronauts didn't mark it for collection before photography, or that ink applied to the back of another photo didn't transfer to the surface of a print (having worked in publications, I've seen that happen more than once). Conspiracy theorists see the CIA under every rock. Reasonable people don't take them very seriously at all.
#10: This "rediscovered" film was shown on the major networks at the time of the landings. The real reason the flag is moving is that the astronaut is holding onto the top of the flagpole, and is trying to wiggle it to seat it more firmly in the lower half of the pole. The flag had wires running through it to hold it out on the airless moon so it could be seen on television. Were there air in this shot, the whole flag would be moving, not just the bottom corner. As with all things, your opinion is open to interpretation. I'd interpret this as a willful attempt to misrepresent facts.
#9: Funny thing about rock: even a 10,000 pound thrust engine won't burn a crater in it. Once you've blown away a layer of dust, nothing else moves. We aimed for rock when choosing landing sites simply because we weren't sure how deep the dust was, and didn't want to lose any ships in sinkholes. I've seen films of the first landing, shot through the windows. The dust streams away, and then stops as the rock is swept clean. Perhaps this might explain the lack of a crater under the LM. Works for me.
#8: Like most Luddite flat-earthers, you've forgotten that the Moon is not Main Street. There are two sources of available light on the Moon that are not the Sun. The first is sunlight reflected off hills and other nearby surfaces. The other is the Earth. Remember, the Earth as seen from the Moon is at least six times the evident size the Moon is when seen from Earth, and is covered by those fluffy (and very reflective) white clouds. If you can read a newspaper by the light of a full moon, imagine what can be done by Earthlight. As for the "hot spots" in the photos, have you ever been to White Sands in New Mexico? You can get a nasty sunburn from the sunlight reflected off the sand even when wearing a hat, and photos show the same hot spots, caused by retroreflection of sunlight from the sand. So much for hot spots and shadows. Now, about the semi-lit figures shown in your streaming video purporting to show multiple shadows from fill light: did you notice the entrance to the LM above one of them? It clearly shows TWO doors, one vertical, the other horizontal. The combination of the two opens an entrance more than large enough for the astronauts and their bulky A7L moonsuits. Thus does your so-called "evidence" disprove your misstatement that the astronauts couldn't exit the LM wearing their suits. Perhaps you should have been more careful in the pictures you posted, because a great many of us are laughing at your mistakes.
#7: Your own video shows the Van Allen belts to be toroidal (donut-shaped), with an open top and bottom. Apollo launches were never equatorial--there was always at least a ten-percent precession in the orbits, which would be more than enough to miss the belts on the way to the Moon. Oops, I guess all those Ham Radio operators that were using parallax on their radio direction finders to independently track progress of the missions weren't crazy after all.
#6: It's often difficult to explain simple physics to those who went through school in Liberal Arts and therefore don't understand or trust science. If the whole structure weighs 30,000 pounds on earth, it only weighs 5,000 pounds on the moon. A 10,000 pound thrust engine would be more than enough to lift this weight to escape velocity. Remember, no air means no drag. This means every second of thrust increases speed without anything to slow it down beyond simple gravitic pull. This makes it not only possible, but quite likely that the LM worked as designed.
#5: Again, the Moon is not Main Street. In an airless vacuum, the only heating done would be by incident solar radiation. Just like a vacuum bottle, there is no transfer of heat from the external surface to the contents. No heating, no need for environmental control. As for your example, you should see my neighbor's new Audi. It has a set of photovoltaic cells built into the moonroof that run a ventilation fan that keeps the car cool without having to use battery power. Do I recall solar arrays on the LM? True, they weren't as efficient as modern arrays, but like the computers of the day, they worked more than well enough to get the job done.
#4: Again, basic physics seems to be beyond your understanding. You WANT the reaction motors at the outer corners to increase their polar moment. As with a motorcycle, you want to centralize the center of mass. This was done by placing the experiments, equipment, lunar rovers, and what-have-you in compartments around the base of the lander, surrounding the center of thrust, and centralizing the major mass. Remember, the trainer that flipped was made to work in six times the gravity, so the thrusters were far more powerful than on the LM. The trainer was not the LM; they were two different devices, built for entirely different missions. Assuming that what happened to one would happen to the other is fallacious at best.
#3: I always love it when a single moment in a three-hour session is taken out of context and misrepresented. I love it even more when a great deal is made of somebody misunderstanding a question. From what we've seen on points 15 through 4, innocent mistakes can easily be made. Do you really hold Michael Collins to a higher standard than you hold yourself? Perhaps you shouldn't.
#2: Ah, the sad tragedy: a launchpad fire kills three of the finest human beings ever born, and all the Congresscritters can do is pick over their bones like useless vultures. All Congress can see is the opportunity to make themselves seem more important, sort of like documentary film-splicers. Remember, I've worn Gus Grissom's backup suit, so I have a better understanding than most of just what was lost. The simple fact is that there was really very little wrong with the Apollo program -- the problems were exaggerated, just as they are on your website.
#1: Finally, down to the Big Lie. Hitler had it right: if you repeat a lie often enough, people will begin to believe it, no matter how ludicrous it might be on the surface. There was no Holocaust, the Earth is flat, and all Apollo missions were in Low Earth Orbit. And now, if you play the Zapruder films backwards, Jack Kennedy wasn't shot by Oswald. One of the nice things about a degree in Radio and Television Broadcasting is that you get to play with the cameras and lights and mixer consoles. One of the first things I learned about the cameras is that you don't dare aim them at a point light source without a filter, or you will burn the image tube out. If something was being placed over the windows of the Control Module, chances are it was some sort of filter to prevent sunlight reflected off Earth's cloud cover from burning out the image tube on the camera. In short, misinterpretation of facts can be skewed and twisted to show almost anything. The good news is that from these pictures, you can tell the Earth isn't really flat.
So that's what it all comes down to. I've shown that the same incidents you claim show no moon landing has ever occurred actually prove the landings DID occur, just as NASA and Nixon indicated. The Van Allen belts can be avoided, your assumptions about physics and science are shown fallacious, and even the photographic "evidence" is proven as sound. I now understand why NASA doesn't publish their book debunking this nonsense: they see no need. Sorry, but nobody's buying what you're selling. Perhaps when your fifteen minutes of fame are up, you can get your job back at Taco Bell. Best of luck in whatever menial job your dad gets for you.
The Setup: My lovely wife Astrid likes to get into work early, the theory being that the earlier she begins, the earlier she can come home to her loving husband and son. This means our first alarm (we have three set most weekdays) goes off at 4:30 AM Pacific time, while she usually doesn't get up much before five. This means we can lie in bed for a few minutes each morning listening to her favorite radio station. The show they have running at that ungodly hour is the immensely popular "AM Coast To Coast." Proving that just because something is popular doesn't necessarily mean it's any good (see my comments on BMW automobiles), this show is populated with an amazing array of ghost hunters, UFOlogists, conspiracy theorists, and genuine card-carrying whack-jobs. One such was evident this last Tuesday morning. It seems this bizarre nut-case, in the finest anti-American tradition, was trying to insist that the Apollo moon landings never occurred, and were instead a massive Government cover-up. Now normally, I just snicker at such stupidity, but this got my back up a mite. One reason might be that I wept openly when, at the age of 12, I grew past the height of 5 feet 8 inches, which at the time was the absolute upper limit of height for astronauts. Yes, that's right, Duke's a closet astronaut wanna-be!
I could have ignored the idiot, but he's put together what he claims is a documentary proving his thesis. It's sold from a website (www.moonmovie.com) that purports to present supporting evidence. Naturally, I looked it all over, snickered at the pseudo-scientific claptrap, and wrote him one of my patented acid-dipped e-mails debunking his claims point-by-point. Here's what I sent him (as he won't have the guts to put it on his site, I'll put it on mine, and let the truth speak for itself):
In 1976, I attended a lecture at UCLA by a member of the Flat Earth Society. He insisted, despite the obvious physical and scientific evidence to the contrary, that we were all mistaken and the Earth was indeed flat. I've reviewed the contents of your website, and place it firmly in this class of self-delusion. Now, admittedly, I'm a science buff, and I have worn Gus Grissom's backup space suit, and I have been around mock-ups of the Lunar Module (LM) and Command Module (CM), but all the things you point out as "proof" are obvious to even the average person as either ignorance of reality or willful misstatement.
Me, I suspect the latter. Why? The statements made on the site and on the air show a clearly liberal political and anti-scientific bent. If the reference to "Tricky Dick" in your list of "15 Hints" wasn't a dead giveaway, the statement during the broadcast that "the money spent on this program could have built...millions of two bedroom homes" certainly made it clear. By the way, where would you put those several million homes -- Death Valley? Certainly no place with infrastructure or jobs.
Let's go over some of those 15 Reasons, shall we? Let's start with:
#15: Beyond your obvious non-understanding of Nixon (full disclosure: I live in Yorba Linda, Nixon's home town, and can easily tell you don't understand his cultural milieu -- or don't want to), three-quarters of the build-up to Apollo was done under Democrat presidents. If there's any hiding being done, could it be the same people who cheated their way into the White House in 1960 thanks to the Chicago Daleys (just as they tried again in 2000)?
#14: The whole Moon Mission thing was America's love letter to Jack Kennedy. The REAL war distraction setup was the Ecology movement. Once the Vietnam war ended, so did the movement. Trust me, I was there when the money dried up. All those committed recyclers went away to do something else (probably fixing more elections). Please bear in mind that I was around for the Vietnam War, as I was for the Moon landings. There was no "near revolt," just as there was no "insurrection" during the LA Riots. Just saying it's so doesn't make it so. The problem with revisionist theories is that there are far too many people still alive who remember the truth. Perhaps in another 50 years, you'll be able to sell this nonsense as reality, but right now, you're considered a crackpot by anybody with any semblance of scientific training.
#13: No argument with any of these. They started out ahead (their captured Nazis were apparently better than our captured Nazis). They didn't stay there. Seems our computers were better than theirs (and our wristwatches, too). Their propaganda machine, however, apparently still has adherents on this side of the pond.
#12: If Neil Armstrong wants to be left alone, who are we to say otherwise? If it was good enough for Garbo, perhaps it should be good enough for him as well. As for Aldrin, I've met the man, and he's a very kind and levelheaded fellow. Something had to have been done to him to get that kind of reaction. From the angle of the shot, it appears the video is from a concealed camera. If I'd been treated so cavalierly, the photographer and interviewer would not have left the room under their own power. From that point of view, I suspect Aldrin showed great restraint.
#11: The "retouching" of this photo consisted of cutting the resolution by roughly 80% (note the loss of detail in the soil behind the rock). As for the big letter C in the first version, I seem to recall pictures of a very large face on the surface of Mars. Of course, it's not really a face, and the natural features of this rock were not shaped by human hands. Of course, we can't be sure one of the astronauts didn't mark it for collection before photography, or that ink applied to the back of another photo didn't transfer to the surface of a print (having worked in publications, I've seen that happen more than once). Conspiracy theorists see the CIA under every rock. Reasonable people don't take them very seriously at all.
#10: This "rediscovered" film was shown on the major networks at the time of the landings. The real reason the flag is moving is that the astronaut is holding onto the top of the flagpole, and is trying to wiggle it to seat it more firmly in the lower half of the pole. The flag had wires running through it to hold it out on the airless moon so it could be seen on television. Were there air in this shot, the whole flag would be moving, not just the bottom corner. As with all things, your opinion is open to interpretation. I'd interpret this as a willful attempt to misrepresent facts.
#9: Funny thing about rock: even a 10,000 pound thrust engine won't burn a crater in it. Once you've blown away a layer of dust, nothing else moves. We aimed for rock when choosing landing sites simply because we weren't sure how deep the dust was, and didn't want to lose any ships in sinkholes. I've seen films of the first landing, shot through the windows. The dust streams away, and then stops as the rock is swept clean. Perhaps this might explain the lack of a crater under the LM. Works for me.
#8: Like most Luddite flat-earthers, you've forgotten that the Moon is not Main Street. There are two sources of available light on the Moon that are not the Sun. The first is sunlight reflected off hills and other nearby surfaces. The other is the Earth. Remember, the Earth as seen from the Moon is at least six times the evident size the Moon is when seen from Earth, and is covered by those fluffy (and very reflective) white clouds. If you can read a newspaper by the light of a full moon, imagine what can be done by Earthlight. As for the "hot spots" in the photos, have you ever been to White Sands in New Mexico? You can get a nasty sunburn from the sunlight reflected off the sand even when wearing a hat, and photos show the same hot spots, caused by retroreflection of sunlight from the sand. So much for hot spots and shadows. Now, about the semi-lit figures shown in your streaming video purporting to show multiple shadows from fill light: did you notice the entrance to the LM above one of them? It clearly shows TWO doors, one vertical, the other horizontal. The combination of the two opens an entrance more than large enough for the astronauts and their bulky A7L moonsuits. Thus does your so-called "evidence" disprove your misstatement that the astronauts couldn't exit the LM wearing their suits. Perhaps you should have been more careful in the pictures you posted, because a great many of us are laughing at your mistakes.
#7: Your own video shows the Van Allen belts to be toroidal (donut-shaped), with an open top and bottom. Apollo launches were never equatorial--there was always at least a ten-percent precession in the orbits, which would be more than enough to miss the belts on the way to the Moon. Oops, I guess all those Ham Radio operators that were using parallax on their radio direction finders to independently track progress of the missions weren't crazy after all.
#6: It's often difficult to explain simple physics to those who went through school in Liberal Arts and therefore don't understand or trust science. If the whole structure weighs 30,000 pounds on earth, it only weighs 5,000 pounds on the moon. A 10,000 pound thrust engine would be more than enough to lift this weight to escape velocity. Remember, no air means no drag. This means every second of thrust increases speed without anything to slow it down beyond simple gravitic pull. This makes it not only possible, but quite likely that the LM worked as designed.
#5: Again, the Moon is not Main Street. In an airless vacuum, the only heating done would be by incident solar radiation. Just like a vacuum bottle, there is no transfer of heat from the external surface to the contents. No heating, no need for environmental control. As for your example, you should see my neighbor's new Audi. It has a set of photovoltaic cells built into the moonroof that run a ventilation fan that keeps the car cool without having to use battery power. Do I recall solar arrays on the LM? True, they weren't as efficient as modern arrays, but like the computers of the day, they worked more than well enough to get the job done.
#4: Again, basic physics seems to be beyond your understanding. You WANT the reaction motors at the outer corners to increase their polar moment. As with a motorcycle, you want to centralize the center of mass. This was done by placing the experiments, equipment, lunar rovers, and what-have-you in compartments around the base of the lander, surrounding the center of thrust, and centralizing the major mass. Remember, the trainer that flipped was made to work in six times the gravity, so the thrusters were far more powerful than on the LM. The trainer was not the LM; they were two different devices, built for entirely different missions. Assuming that what happened to one would happen to the other is fallacious at best.
#3: I always love it when a single moment in a three-hour session is taken out of context and misrepresented. I love it even more when a great deal is made of somebody misunderstanding a question. From what we've seen on points 15 through 4, innocent mistakes can easily be made. Do you really hold Michael Collins to a higher standard than you hold yourself? Perhaps you shouldn't.
#2: Ah, the sad tragedy: a launchpad fire kills three of the finest human beings ever born, and all the Congresscritters can do is pick over their bones like useless vultures. All Congress can see is the opportunity to make themselves seem more important, sort of like documentary film-splicers. Remember, I've worn Gus Grissom's backup suit, so I have a better understanding than most of just what was lost. The simple fact is that there was really very little wrong with the Apollo program -- the problems were exaggerated, just as they are on your website.
#1: Finally, down to the Big Lie. Hitler had it right: if you repeat a lie often enough, people will begin to believe it, no matter how ludicrous it might be on the surface. There was no Holocaust, the Earth is flat, and all Apollo missions were in Low Earth Orbit. And now, if you play the Zapruder films backwards, Jack Kennedy wasn't shot by Oswald. One of the nice things about a degree in Radio and Television Broadcasting is that you get to play with the cameras and lights and mixer consoles. One of the first things I learned about the cameras is that you don't dare aim them at a point light source without a filter, or you will burn the image tube out. If something was being placed over the windows of the Control Module, chances are it was some sort of filter to prevent sunlight reflected off Earth's cloud cover from burning out the image tube on the camera. In short, misinterpretation of facts can be skewed and twisted to show almost anything. The good news is that from these pictures, you can tell the Earth isn't really flat.
So that's what it all comes down to. I've shown that the same incidents you claim show no moon landing has ever occurred actually prove the landings DID occur, just as NASA and Nixon indicated. The Van Allen belts can be avoided, your assumptions about physics and science are shown fallacious, and even the photographic "evidence" is proven as sound. I now understand why NASA doesn't publish their book debunking this nonsense: they see no need. Sorry, but nobody's buying what you're selling. Perhaps when your fifteen minutes of fame are up, you can get your job back at Taco Bell. Best of luck in whatever menial job your dad gets for you.