The notion that the Apollo Moon Landings might have been
faked first came to my attention in the late 1990's and it startled me; I
quickly became involved in Internet discussion groups about it (the good old
forums of the pre-Facebook age!) and read Dark
Moon by Mary Bennett and David Percy, see: http://www.aulis.com/image-viewer.htm?gallery/Fgallery2-1.jpg.
As always I've striven to look at both sides of the story. I've debated this
issue many times and read a lot of rebuttal material, and last night was part
of my research because I went to my local Skeptics in the Pub to see Megan
Whewell live, see: http://oxford.skepticsinthepub.org/Event.aspx/1995/The-Apollo-Moon-Landings-How-We-Know-They-Really-Happened.
Megan Whewell is an astrophysicist, currently a postgraduate student at the
University College of London, but her previous job was as part of the education
team at the National Space Centre in Leicester . "I
love space!" she said during her lecture and she did come across as very
enthusiastic about astronautics, as most of those who challenge the moon
landing hoax are. To her credit, she also disagrees with The Coxxer and thinks
that the subject is still worth talking about, unlike what he rants about in
this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1aXuQ9Dg2gE.
(See here for more information on Prof. Brian Cox: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/prof-brian-cox-watch-this-space.html).
I've missed the previous few Oxford SiTP's; the last one I went to was the one
on Steiner Schools, see here from 15.05: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=efpvWOfA17o.
However I did attend the Greenwich
one a few weeks ago, see: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.co.uk/2014/02/rob-brotherton-and-psychology-of.html.
The venue has happily moved back from The
Wig and Pen on George Street to The
St Aldates Tavern with its much more comfortable and charming function
room, and the bar there is always tended. At the start of her lecture Megan
asked for a show of hands for who believes the moon landings were real, who
thinks they're faked and who's undecided. I kept my hand down for all those
questions because I was still in disguise... kind of... for the reasons I state
in my report on the Greenwich
event. She looked at me and said: "I notice not everybody raised their
hands; that's fine, no pressure." She introduced her subject by stating
from the outset that she was not there to persuade anybody who vehemently
didn't agree. Her interest in the moon landing hoax theory came from a project
she did at the Space Centre where she did meet "conspiracy theorists"
like me and told them why she differs. She considers these talks a wholehearted
success and, despite her professed lack of objective, she reckons she's
achieved on average one conversion a day.
The theory Megan Whewell addresses is that the Apollo Moon
Landings of July 1969 to December 1972 did not
take place, that NASA actually did not send any manned spacecraft to the moon
at all and that the evidence that they did is fraudulent. The moon rocks are
not real and the TV broadcasts were filmed in a studio on Earth etc. For
somebody new to this information, it's a stunning allegation; it certainly was
when I first heard it. The first person to propose it was Bill Kaysing who
published a book in 1976 about it. Then, according to Megan, the whole issue
became more or less dormant until 2001 when this TV documentary was aired on
the Fox network, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5MVVtFYTSo,
and it is the evidence contained therein that she bases her lecture on. One of
the most well-known suspicious elements is that the flag appears to move by
itself when nobody is touching it, as a flag would do on Earth when being blown
by the breeze. However there is supposed to be no atmosphere on the moon and so
why does the flag do this. According to Megan, it doesn't. The flag moves
because the astronauts are fiddling with it, and when they leave it alone it
simply flaps from the residual motion of their actions, which is more
pronounced because of the lack of aerodynamic drag. This is not entirely true,
there are one or two suspicious pieces of footage, for example see here at
2.36: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymwE1sNm82Y.
Actually I'd be very surprised if the film makers who made this wouldn't think
of that problem anyway, especially if that technical genius Stanley Kubrick was
involved, as has been suggested. They would have been very careful to avoid any
disturbances of the flag and the above link shows something that slipped
through the editors net. One thing that many Apollo-believers thinks proves
their case are the presence of the retro reflectors; these are a set of lenses
said to have been placed on the moon by the Apollo astronauts which can be
detected by shining a laser at them from the Earth. However, as Gerhard
Wisnewski points out in his book One
Small Step?, you don't necessarily need an artificial lens to get a laser
reflection off the moon, see: http://www.amazon.com/One-Small-Step-Great-Dominate/dp/1905570120
(This book is originally written in German and was titled Lügen im Weltraum- "Lies in Space"). And what's more
human hands are not necessary for placing equipment on the moon, it can be done
by unmanned craft like the Jade Rabbit rover or Opportunity
and the vehicles currently exploring Mars; this relates to the subject of the
secret space programme which I'll come on to in more detail later. Megan then
deals with the visual evidence, including questions about why there are no
stars visible in the lunar sky on any of the Apollo photographs. She explains
that this is because normal camera settings cannot capture stars; this is exactly
the same when trying to photograph stars on Earth. You need a special astronomy
camera with extra long exposure settings; there are also no stars in any of the
photos taken from low Earth orbit on the International Space Station. For me
this is not much of an argument for either side and I wonder why anybody
originally brought it up. Megan then talked about the strange cases of shadows
in the photos being in directions which indicate the presence of a local light
source, when we're told that the only light available to the astronauts was
from the sun. Some of these anomalies can be explained the way she does, that
it was all to do with ground contours, but not all of them can. Just because
tricks of perspective and an uneven surface means shadows can sometimes fall in
different directions, doesn't mean that they can fall anywhere you like. She
sites the MythBusters episode on the
moon landing hoax several times during this segment of her lecture, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qz7cUP4o-ZQ.
She uses their tests to explain the way the photographs do not contain
silhouettes and appear correctly lit all round. As I've said elsewhere, it
seems odd that the MythBusters team
would attempt to debunk the idea that the moon photos were shot in a studio by
recreating them... in a studio. Jay Windley made the same mistake, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AuUPYQIL2hY.
In studio conditions it's easy to control elements that shouldn't be controlled
in a fair test, like the more extreme contrast of sunlight. This is a problem
anybody who's taken a photograph in bright sunlight knows all too well. On the
moon there is no atmosphere to shade the surface from the sun's full glare and
all the wavelengths that air and cloud filter out strike the scene directly.
That's a neat segueway onto the subject of radiation. The Van Allen Belts are
large zones of intense radioactive particles that surround the Earth. Megan
claims that there was no danger from them and as it happens these belts are not
particularly dangerous so long as you fly through them quickly, as the Apollo
spacecraft did. However, the two Van Allen Belts were only discovered in 1959,
just two years before President Kennedy made his announcement that NASA should
put a man on the moon before 1970. When the Apollo rockets were designed and
built, how much was really known about the possible hazards they posed. This
issue was complicated further by Operation Starfish Prime in 1962 which
detonated a nuclear bomb in space and created a third belt of radiation around
the Earth. As Bennett and Percy point out, estimates on the dimensions and
intensity of the Van Allen Belts vacillated considerably even into the 1990's.
And because the Belts emerge out of the interaction of solar wind with the
Earth's magnetic field, would they change over the course of the sun's sunspot
cycle? These are questions that the NASA chiefs must have been deliberating.
The prospect of a mistake was just too terrible to contemplate; brave American
space pioneers dying from radiation poisoning, and all live on TV! And with the
Soviets looking on of course, resting on the laurels of their previous victories
in the Space Race. What's more once a spacecraft has left the shelter of the
Earth's magnetosphere then comes the potentially even greater peril of solar
flares and cosmic rays. Megan dismisses this by saying: "They just got
lucky." Well, it's easy to say that after
the astronauts have all come home safely. Another charge is that the motion
pictures from the moon were also doctored; Megan sees this being done as
impossible and sites this researcher's video as proof, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGXTF6bs1IU.
I'm not convinced that this couldn't be done if enough resources were involved.
Megan also thinks that the moon rock brought back to Earth is another good
reason to think that the Apollo moon landings were real. The idea that these
rocks are actually normal rock from the Earth doesn't add up because by
analyzing the crystals in them you can tell that they formed in the lower
gravity of the moon. Some moon rock has found its way onto the Earth by natural
means. It gets blasted off the moon by meteor impacts and then flies around in
space for a while until some of it eventually falls onto the Earth. However
only 46 kilograms of this rock has ever been found and it bears the telltale
scars of impact with the Earth's atmosphere, a scorched and vitrified outer
layer etc. I agree with her on this, the moon rock we see in museums is real
moon rock, but was it picked up by the hands of Neil Armstrong et al? This again brings us into the
realm of the secret space programme. Unlike some moon landing hoax theorists, I
don't doubt that people have been to the moon. I'm virtually convinced that
that we have; all I question is whether it was done at the time, and using the
methods and personnel, that history tells us it was. If you consider the kind
of free energy and antigravity technology that the governments are sitting on
then it seems absurd that they wouldn't allow initiated individuals to use them
to travel to the moon, see here for background: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/real-hoverboards.html.
According to Megan Whewell, there has been multiple
independent confirmation of the reality of the Apollo programme via subsequent
space missions carried out not only by NASA but by other countries like India ,
the European Union, Japan
and China . This
is a long and complicated issue, but I wonder how independent those missions
really were. As you know I think that national sovereignty has always been
something of an illusion, and a conditional illusion at that. There is only one
real government in this world, the Illuminati-controlled world government. This
may go somewhere to answering a crucial question about the Apollo programme: If
it was a hoax, why did the Russians collaborate with it? At the time, the
Soviet Space Programme was the only other institution in the world capable of
confirming or denying that the Apollo Moon Landings took place. If they smelt a
rat they would have been all too eager to send their own craft up to the moon
and see if the NASA landing sites were there or not. Also, only after the Cold
War were the complete achievements of the Soviet intelligence agencies truly
revealed and people gasped when they realized how successful the KGB had been
in penetrating Western governments, intelligence, militaries and corporations,
like with the Cambridge Spies, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gonvvQCnbOU.
NASA was not immune to this scrutiny from behind the Iron Curtain and if they
tired to fake the Moon Landings the Russians would have known about it long
before the first rocket was even launched. This argument is all built upon the
assumption that the Space Race was the same thing at the highest levels of
authority as is was presented to the public as being. We were all told that the
two global superpowers were locked in a bitter rivalry over who could do what
in space first. Until Apollo the Russians had a decisive lead; they'd launched
the first orbital rocket, Sputnik 1, and got the first man into space, Yuri
Gagarin. Apollo was a chance for the USA
to strike back. When the moon landings happened, America 's
pride was restored and the Russians were bitterly humiliated. The Soviets also
had a manned lunar landing project in the advanced planning stages, called
"LOK", but this was cancelled after the rocket blew up on the launch
pad. Also the victory of the Americans in reaching the moon first apparently
demoralized them so much that they just couldn't go on. This doesn't strike me
as a very good reason to throw in the towel; and it doesn't fit in with the
attitude of those involved in manned space flight at the time. Up till then
they had always persevered in the face of hardship and hadn't let the other
side getting there first put them off. The Americans suffered even worse
setbacks, not only the Russians beating them into space, but the Apollo 1
disaster in which three astronauts were killed, but did they quit? It doesn't quite
ring true to me. I think that the Space Race was far more than it appeared to
be, it was a massive propaganda hammer that both sides used to excess; it was
also only one part of a far more extensive conflict that was battled out down
here on Earth. For both sides it was as much about information and
disinformation as it was rockets, missiles and tanks. The war was fought
against the people at home as much as it was those in the enemy's country. This
was never more obvious than during the Vietnam War which was raging at the
time; it was portrayed, wrongly, as the a just cause because it was Cold War in
proxy: "fightin' them goddamn Communists wherever they raises they
heads!" It is therefore not implausible that both sides saw it as
beneficial for the Americans to be allowed to catch up... or be seen to catch up. It's possible that
an analogy of the story of The Tortoise
and the Hare was emerging for real; if the playing field hadn't been
levelled, would the populace, on either side, have lost interest? Would they
have begun asking why so much money was being channelled from domestic social
programmes when there was so much poverty and hardship among their citizens?
There was also the thorny problem of the massive grain import that had just
been arranged between the USA
and the Soviet Union . This deal may have prevented
famine in Russia ;
it was very important to the Soviet regime that it remained in place. But could
there have been another motive for their silence, one involving their own space
programme? As Wisnewski points out, as do Bennett and Percy, there is major
quandary related to the validity of some of the Soviet achievements too, like
the flight of Yuri Gagarin on Vostok 1. Some similar discrepancies can be found
in the visual record of that mission, as much as with Apollo, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3rgvSVdHr1Y;
note the peculiar lighting effects inside the capsule for example. Why didn't
the Americans shout that from the rooftops? Maybe it was for the same reason
The Russians didn't about Apollo; both sides somehow agreed to turn a blind eye
to each other's lies.
What's that you see in the photo above? A Space Shuttle? Yes,
but one without windows? It is actually a Boeing X37, an unmanned spaceplane
built for the US Government on the Black Budget. Its purpose is unknown and all
operations related to it are highly classified, but I imagine its role is
reconnaissance and intelligence gathering. It can orbit continuously for up to
a year. This is just one minor part, the tip of the iceberg, of the secret
space programme. The secret space programme is at least as old as the public
one, and probably much older; there's evidence that Nazi Germany made some
major inroads. At the deeper level it involves far more than just secret
military Space Shuttles; it delves into the abyss of esoteric energy and
propulsion systems that would make rockets totally obsolete. The defence
journalist Nick Cook has done some good work into finding out the truth behind
this dark and sinister subject with these two documentaries, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FEdTfL1G-yw
and: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kD9RA1R3pOk.
But even he only scratches the surface. At the same time evidence is emerging
of artificial-looking structures on the moon and planets, see: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/mystery-object-spotted-on-moon.html.
These could be artefacts of an extraterrestrial civilization, past or present,
but what if some of them come from down here? There is testimony emerging from
some very credible people who have been involved in secret research into energy
and propulsion systems not recognized by mainstream science nor published for
the general population to examine and use, for example see: http://globalbem.com/. Why would this happen
when these discoveries could do so much good, relieve us from the need for
fossil fuels, eliminate poverty, end environmental destruction etc? The reasons
why this technology is suppressed and we are not all flying round our towns in
antigravity aircraft is a big subject, but I tackle it in detail here: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/ben-emlyn-jones-live-at-truth-juice-hull.html.
It is clear that if this technology exists then it will be used by those
initiated to use it; and this throws the whole concept of space exploration
into an entirely new light. It is impossible to consider the validity of the
Apollo Moon Landings without taking this into account. As I said, I don't doubt
that people have been to the moon; I'm sure that they were going there long
before the first American and Russian rockets even lifted off. There are bases
on the moon, some manmade and some extraterrestrial; maybe a few of them are a
combined effort. In fact why would they stop at the moon? Have the Illuminati
even visited other planets without telling us? Maybe they've even gone beyond
our solar system to other stars. It's even possible that the secret studio
where the moon landing images were filmed really is on the moon, at one of the
bases there. Or it might be on Mercury or a similar airless heavenly body. If
so then don't you think we, the people, have a right to know?
More detailed
background on the subject of this article. See here for a report on Marcus
Allen's debate at the British Interplanetary Society: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/marcus-allen-at-bis-update.html.
See here for a
previous article I wrote about the Moon Landings: http://hpanwo.blogspot.co.uk/2009/01/i-went-to-godamn-moon.html.
There were a few questions during the question and answer
session after Megan Whewell had finished her speech. These mostly related to
the psychology of "conspiracy theorists" which Megan did not respond
to, saying that it was not her field of study; really she and Rob Brotherton
should make a double-act. She doesn't think that the achievements of China or
other nations in space will either reinforce or diffuse disbelief over the moon
landings. At the end Megan put up links on her display screen to various
anti-hoax websites like Clavius, see: http://www.clavius.org/.
This website includes a discussion forum, but I would advise HPANWO-readers not to join it; I did myself once and I
regret it. I was not allowed the chance to engage in a civil debate and was
subjected to extreme rudeness and hostility. I'm glad I went along to this
Skeptics in the Pub and thanks to Megan and all the organizers for setting it
up. However, her repertoire didn't contain many points that I haven't heard
before; I feel that she has fashioned her delivery for somebody new to the
subject. As I've said elsewhere before, the Skeptic Movement itself is an
ideology and is not directly related to science and reason, see: http://hpanwo-radio.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/programme-5-podcast-skeptics.html.
I wonder, despite their constant appeal for "evidence!", whether they
are being objective about themselves.
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