"I Went to the Godamn Moon!"

In loving memory of Bill Kaysing and Ralph Rene, two men who weren’t afraid to turn the thoughts of many into words.

This sketch from the hilarious Little Britain comedy show is about the adventures of Bing Gordyn, a retired Apollo astronaut: http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=45885441 . It may well be inspired by a real event. This one: http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=mQKxAqpjroo&feature=channel_page . The man Buzz Aldrin attacks is Bart Sibrel, a self-styled researcher into the moon landing hoax. In my view Sibrel is nothing but a cheap opportunist and self-publicist; his attitude is judgmental and his methods are highly unprofessional. However questions over the Apollo missions, and indeed much of the rest of the space programme, continue to circulate in my own mind.

The announcement by NASA in 1969 that they’d succeeded in landing two astronauts on the moon was received with worldwide rapture. Over a billion people watched the live broadcast of the Apollo 11 landing on their TV sets. This was followed by 5 other successful missions. Live TV broadcasts were not the only data the space agency provided. They also brought back photographs of lunar scenes, geological specimens and electromagnetic readings. However a small but vocal minority of people, including myself, still doubt that the Apollo missions really did land men on the moon. This is a subject too long to detail here, but the basic hypothesis is that NASA did not send anyone to the moon and falsified the Apollo data to fool everyone into thinking that they did. The Apollo craft took off from the NASA Cape Canaveral space centre in Florida, but did not go to the moon and merely remained in low Earth orbit. The visual record was then secretly filmed in a studio on Earth and the rocks provided were just ordinary Earth rocks; either that or real moon rocks provided by unmanned craft like the Luna probes. I’ve written more on this subject than any other and I cover the moon hoax hypothesis in every detail during the debates on the HPANWO forum in threads like this one: http://hpanwoforum.freeforums.org/were-the-moon-landings-faked-2-t366.html and
http://hpanwoforum.freeforums.org/were-the-moon-landings-faked-t16.html .

There are many websites examining this subject, invariably from a pro or anti-conspiracy viewpoint. None which I’ve seen are completely unbiased. What’s more, none of them cover every aspect of the field so you’ll need to do a lot of searching. As always I’m not courting the agreement of HPANWO-readers. I encourage you to look at both sides of the story and make up your own minds. These two websites are probably the best examples of each: Pro: http://www.aulis.com/exposing_apollo1.htm Anti: http://www.clavius.org/ .

As you can see, the hoax theory has been met by a backlash from debunkers. And in 2007 one of them made a YouTube film, Lunar Legacy. Here it is (Some of this is missing. I remember it being longer):

Lunar Legacy:
Episode 1
Part1 http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=khDI2MsWSYc
Part2 http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=IrI3iQqTdns&feature=related
Part3 http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=zspt2xD4VsY&feature=channel
Part4 http://tinyurl.com/2tv6n
Addendum: The TV Transmission Conspiracy Theorists Hate!: http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=I_CMgqitv98&feature=channel_page

The producer is a YouTube member called “Svector”, whom some claim is really Jay Windley, webmaster of the Clavius site and contributor to the recent National Geographic Channel’s hoax debunking TV show: http://www.livevideo.com/video/35425C893D454A978AF9BC74887FA7CA/conspiracy-moon-landing-3-of-3.aspx . On the technical side, Svector is a genius; these are easily the best YouTube vids I’ve seen. They’re very glossy, intricate and very impressive for a home-made amateur production. However like all Moon-landing hoax debunkers, he uses fallacies and makes many errors. Here is a point-by-point critique of them:

Part 1: The narrator introduces the subject in a very prejudicial way by using dysphemisms and “loaded words”: He refers to people who question the Apollo missions as “fanatical conspiracy theorists”, thus setting the scene for how the viewer is meant to perceive us. In the next sentence he uses more loaded words, this time positive ones. He says “every reputable member of the scientific community (says the moon landings were real)”. This immediately engenders in the viewer a warm and attractive image of any learned man who supports the official story of the moon landings. Svector uses loaded language again in Part 3 when he calls us “Conspiracy believers” and in Part 4 where he describes David Percy as an “Apollo conspiracist”. Here’s a Wikipedia explanation of this fallacy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loaded_words and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dysphemism . Svector then goes on to note the behavior of the surface dust on the moon in order to debunk the theory that it is a very fine material, like talcum or flour, laid out on a studio floor. However he makes the assumption that the same material is used in all the comparison shots. Why assume that? They could have used talcum or flour for the close-ups of footprints and another coarser material for the wider frames of the “astronauts” walking about.
Part 2: I imagine that the production team which gave us the Apollo TV footage were selected more for their willingness to keep secrets than their membership of the David Lean school, but I don’t think even the most sloppy film-maker would fail to pick up on something as blatant as allowing the flag to be seen by the viewer to move in the breeze. However nobody is perfect; here’s one shot that perhaps slipped through the editor’s fingers: http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=n1UEv2PIzl4 .
Part 3: Apollo hoax-debunkers do themselves no favours when they continually hark back to the episode of Penn and Teller’s Bullshit! which concerns the Apollo hoax theory. Penn and Teller are two men for whom anything other than loaded words are anathema! And then the hoax-debunkers go on to claim that if the moon landings were really fake then insiders would have spoken out about it! When they see how people who do so are treated, I doubt that! Svector also quotes the statement denouncing the Fox TV pro-hoax production made by Dr James van Allen, discoverer of the radiation belts that surround the Earth which bear his name. What Svector doesn’t refer to is an earlier statement made by van Allen in which he says words along the lines of: “There exists around the Earth a region of intense radioactive particles against which astronauts will need to be protected”. How dangerous were these radioactive particles? Did they know at the time Apollo was being planned? These two quotes seem contradictory to me. As for Svector’s analysis of Bart Sibrel?... Fair comment!
Part 4: In Part 4 Svector once again attempts to smear the character of a hoax theorist, David Percy, by calling him a “colleague” of Bart Sibrel. Percy is in no way connected to Sibrel other than their shared interest in the moon landing hoax theory. The two sometimes exchange information, as independent researchers often do, but they do not work together. Sibrel’s stencil theory was never one that impressed me and is correctly discounted. However Percy’s transparency theory is much more convincing. Showing that the images of the Earth taken by the camera change over time, mimicking the natural rotation of the planet, does not prove that they are pictures of the real Earth. Percy may well be right in that different transparencies were used, slightly altered images to mark the passage of time. The special effects team may well have anticipated this requirement. Having done so I don’t see why it would be so difficult to change the transparencies, yet still make the footage look like a single unedited shot. TV trickery experts, and even stage conjurers, do things like this all the time. Also in the zoom-out shot afterwards, it does look like something is taped over the Command Module window because you can see a sliver of brighter light shining through a small gap between the edge of whatever is taped up and the window frame. I also wonder why the cameraman, who was presumably Buzz Aldrin because Mike Collins and Neil Armstrong are visible and recognizable in the frame, decided to film the Earth from the far side of the compartment. Why not move closer to the window; it would be a much easier shot?
Addendum: The TV Transmission Conspiracy Theorists Hate!: Eh? I don’t hate this at all! I’m sure this scene was originally in the missing parts of the main Lunar Legacy film, along with a score and captions. Here Svector makes the same mistake he employed in Part 1 when he discussed the surface dust. He uses the absence of a special effect in one shot to prove that the absence of that same effect in another completely separate shot makes that shot real. In this piece of footage we see the camera zoon out and pan to the other Command Module window showing the object we’re told is the Earth in both windows. This shows that in this case they are clearly not using a transparency, but this does not mean that what we see is the real Earth. There are many sci-fi movies that are admittedly fictional that use all the special effects we see in the Apollo visual record.

Unlike most Apollo moon landing doubters, I don’t claim that nobody has ever been to the moon. All I claim is that this achievement did not happen at the time and using the methods and personnel history tells us it did. I think it’s likely, even probable, that people from the Earth have traveled to the moon and probably other planets too. There may even be permanent human settlements all over the solar system and beyond; in fact its possible that the Apollo footage was indeed filmed in an outdoor studio on the moon or a similar airless heavenly body. With the secret technology developed by experts in anti-gravity, along with that back-engineered from salvaged alien spacecraft crashes, it seems unlikely that initiated members of the human race have not used this technology to build craft with capabilities way beyond anything of those publicly-available. Humanity will never travel around the solar system in the crude, Stone Age chemical rockets we see chugging their way labouriously into low Earth orbit on TV. Hopefully one day soon all people on our planet will have access to the sophisticated science the Illuminati currently hoards for its own advantage and then we will indeed become creatures of the stars.