Too Much of a Good Thing
– Pt 1

 

We call this feature 'So What's the Truth' but the reality is that truth is often not easy to come by, even for those of us not blinded by ideology, or 'group think', or political correctness. Laying aside Mayan calendars, and biblical prophesies, and Edgar Cayce, and Nostradamus, it's clear that we are living through a very dangerous period in the evolution of our species on this little blue planet. If it were not so we would not see programs about survival shelters and the end of the world on the History Channel, the National Geographic Channel, and the Travel Channel. Even the Weather Channel of all places has been running a series on Thursday evenings about all the ways life on Earth could be wiped out.

People are rightly concerned about the future and part of my purpose in writing these features is to provide some reliable tools of analysis for sorting out all the claims and counter claims made by both the establishment and the anti-establishment.

Today we are going to examine what can happen when we have too much of a good thing, in this case a skeptical attitude. What brought this to mind is the passing awhile back of astronaut Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the Moon, and the fact that there are still quite a few people out there who believe the entire moon program was a fraud. These skeptics believe that no one has ever walked on the Moon. It was all staged in a movie studio complete with Hollywood special effects.

Let's all agree that having a skeptical attitude is a good idea. Otherwise you'll be taken to the cleaner by every smooth talking vacuum salesman who shows up on your doorstep. Let's further agree that you can't always trust government officials to be completely honest when it comes to giving the public the straight story, especially when the term 'national security' is invoked and large sums of taxpayer money are being spent. So when someone says they've spotted inconsistencies in the official record that point to deception and possibly corruption on a massive scale it behooves us as citizens to at least look at their evidence.

Some years ago privately made videos were circulating on the Internet and at sporting goods shows that laid out the case for a fake moon landing. I viewed some of these and was struck by how easily people with no background in photography or video production might be fooled into believing the assertions of skeptics. I'm going to go through four major arguments of these skeptics and show how each piece of so-called evidence has a perfectly rational explanation that has nothing at all to do with a conspiracy to deceive Americans – foreign competitors like Russia and China maybe – but not Americans.

Let's start with an easy one, the fact that when you view the film shot by the astronauts on the Moon you don't see any stars in the background, just the pitch blackness of outer space. Of course that's the case, say the skeptics, because the whole thing was shot in a movie studio.

Any amateur photographer with experience shooting outdoors at night could explain to you that trying to capture the pinpoints of light from stars on a black background is next to impossible on the Moon because of the intense glare produced by the gray lunar surface during the lunar day.

Now if you had film of the astronauts walking around on the surface during the lunar night and there were still no stars in the background then you would have a lot stronger case for some kind of fakery. But all the moon landings happened during the brightness of the lunar day so the astronauts could see where they were landing and where they were walking.

With today's advances in radar imaging and night vision technology, a new manned mission to the Moon might be able to land safely in darkness. But that capability did not exist in the early 1970s.

Let's move on to film of the astronauts driving around on the surface of the Moon. Skeptics point to sequences in the documentary shown at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington which include lunar landscape scenes that don't match the conversations between the astronauts. In the opening scene the astronauts are driving away from the lunar lander with the sun casting distinctive shadows on the rover and nearby rocks.

Later we see similar scenes from the Rover but now the astronauts are talking about being almost back to the Lander from their just completed excursion across a portion of the lunar surface. In other words the film shows a Rover leaving the area of the Lander but the recorded audio is about returning. Obviously all of this must be fake according to lunar landing skeptics.

Well, not so fast. There is a perfectly reasonable explanation if you have any knowledge of documentary production techniques and the ways of federal government procurement. Easily the most likely explanation is that NASA hired a production studio in L.A. to take the raw film shot by the astronauts and turn it into an entertaining and informative film to be shown at the Air and Space Museum. The producers simply took the best pictures and combined them with the most interesting dialogue between the astronauts and through the miracle of sound overdubbing turned out a product that, while not precisely true to reality in every detail, nevertheless presented to a lay audience the sights and sounds of what it was like for humans to cruise around the surface of the Moon.

So in effect the producers took a few liberties with the material and probably thought no one would ever notice. They probably shouldn't have done that but the point is that what looks like strong evidence for a conspiracy really is not.

Next we have the missing blue prints for the entire Apollo program. No one seems to know where they are, or those who do are not telling. You see, say the conspiracy theorists, they're lying to us because there never were any blue prints and the whole thing was a Hollywood fabrication...

Well again, not so fast. Having grown up during the Cold War I remember well the paranoia - not all of it unjustified - that accompanied just about every military and space project during those years. Russian spies after all had stolen the plans for the atomic bomb and we would later learn of numerous other serious penetrations of U.S. national security, some of which lasted for many years.

Having personally worked with defense contractors on military funded projects I feel very confident that both the government and all of the contractors involved with Apollo were bound and determined to insure that the Soviets didn't steal the crowning achievement of American science and technology. So I would be willing to bet that all the blueprints are safely stored away somewhere. It's just that the number of people who know 'where' is probably very small indeed.

Let's look at one last example of purported evidence that the Moon landing was faked. If you visit the large Apollo exhibit at the Air and Space Museum you'll have the opportunity to enter into what is described as an exact replica of the lunar lander that took Armstrong and Aldrin to the surface of the Moon. In fact, if my memory is correct, this is identified as the unit that the astronauts actually used to train on for that mission.

Except that the skeptics have uncovered a little problem. The hatch to enter and leave the lander is too small for a fully suited astronaut to pass through. There-fore it is not an exact replica at all and is just one more proof, say the skeptics, that the moon landing never happened and Apollo program was a huge fraud.

There are in my opinion two better explanations. Either this was an early mockup of the final lander and engineers discovered their mistake in the hatch design, or this was – and still is – a deliberate effort to deceive would be copiers of American space technology, whether Russian or Chinese or Indian or some other nation, wanting to develop moon landing technology on the cheap.

Either way it fits perfectly with the Cold War “beat the Russians” space race mindset of the Apollo era and is a lot more believable than some kind of far fetched conspiracy theory.

Next time we will try to answer the question: Is there still any gold at Ft. Knox? In the meantime keep an open mind but don't believe everything you see or hear on the Internet or in the media. In other words, don't be a gullible skeptic.