Articles About Moon Landing Conspiracy Theories

Note: This was the first proficiency that I have done and I believe that it turned out well. As you can see, I took two articles, one from someone who says Neil Armstrong Jr. and Buzz Aldrin did land on the moon and another who said that they did not, and then I formulated my own opinion in a four paragraph paper at the bottom. I would like to apologize for the lack of visuals but the two correlating pictures which are beneath the second article were the only ones that I found could be somewhat self-explanatory.

Vocal Minority Insists It Was All Smoke and MirrorsThey walk among us, seemingly little different from you or me. Most of the time, you would never know of their true nature — except that occasionally, they feel compelled to speak up.

Take an example from Lens, this newspaper’s photography blog. A recent feature, “Dateline: Space,” displayed stunning NASA photographs, including the iconic photo of Neil Armstrong standing on the lunar surface.

The second comment on the feature stated flatly, “Man never got to the moon.”

The author of the post, Nicolas Marino, went on to say, “I think media should stop publicizing something that was a complete sham once and for all and start documenting how they lied blatantly to the whole world.”
Forty years after men first touched the lifeless dirt of the Moon — and they did. Really. Honest. — polling consistently suggests that some 6 percent of Americans believe the landings were faked and could not have happened. The series of landings, one of the greatest gambles of the human race, was an elaborate hoax developed to raise national pride, many among them insist.

They examine photos from the missions for signs of studio fakery, and claim to be able to tell that the American flag was waving in what was supposed to be the vacuum of space. They overstate the health risks of traveling through the radiation belts that girdle our planet; they understate the technological prowess of the American space program; and they cry murder behind every death in the program, linking them to an overall conspiracy.

And while there is no credible evidence to support such views, and the sheer unlikelihood of being able to pull off such an immense plot and keep it secret for four decades staggers the imagination, the deniers continue to amass accusations to this day. They are bolstered by films like a documentary shown on Fox television in 2001 and “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Moon” by Bart Sibrel, a filmmaker in Nashville.

“There are smart, normal people who buy into these conspiracy theories,” said Philip Plait, an astronomer and author who counters the conspiracy theorists point by point and at excruciating length at his “Bad Astronomy” Web site. He is one of many people who have joined the fight to affirm that It Happened. A group effort, at www.clavius.org, debunks with gusto; its main author, Jay Windley, named the site for the Moon base in Arthur C. Clarke’s classic science fiction novel, “2001: A Space Odyssey.”

Even though the so-called evidence from the conspiracists can clearly be proved wrong, Mr. Plait said, understanding the proof can require a working knowledge of history and photography and of science and its methodology. “You’ve got to do the work; you’ve got to put the elbow grease to it,” he said, “and most people don’t do the work. So these things get traction.”

Mr. Marino, the author of the post on the Lens blog, is a 31-year-old architect born in Argentina. In an e-mail interview, he said that the political corruption during the years of dictatorship in his country shaped his thinking: “I started to realize how political corruption operates and how it is the interests of a few in power that really governs our world.”

As he traveled the world — he now lives and works in China — he picked up books contending that the landings were faked and saw documentaries including Mr. Sibrel’s, he said, which paints a dark portrait of political manipulation during the Nixon administration and somehow ties in the Vietnam War, the Titanic and the Tower of Babel before even getting to the supposed photographic evidence of lunar deception.

Mr. Sibrel, who sells his films online, has hounded Apollo astronauts with a Bible, insisting that they swear on camera they had walked on the Moon. He so annoyed Buzz Aldrin in 2002 — ambushing him with his Bible and calling him “a coward, and a liar, and a thief” — that Mr. Aldrin punched Mr. Sibrel in the face. Law enforcement officials refused to file charges against Mr. Aldrin, the second man on the Moon.

In an interview, Mr. Sibrel said that his efforts to prove that men never walked on the Moon has cost him dearly. “I have suffered only persecution and financial loss,” he said. “I’ve lost visitation with my son. I’ve been expelled from churches. All because I believe the Moon landings are fraudulent.”

Ted Goertzel, a professor of sociology at Rutgers University who has studied conspiracy theorists, said “there’s a similar kind of logic behind all of these groups, I think.” For the most part, he explained, “They don’t undertake to prove that their view is true” so much as to “find flaws in what the other side is saying.” And so, he said, argument is a matter of accumulation instead of persuasion. “They feel if they’ve got more facts than the other side, that proves they’re right.”

Mark Fenster, a professor at the University of Florida Levin College of Law who has written extensively on conspiracy theories, said he sees similarities between people who argue that the Moon landings never happened and those who insist that the 9/11 attacks were planned by the government and that President Obama’s birth certificate is fake: at the core, he said, is a polarization so profound that people end up with an unshakable belief that those in power “simply can’t be trusted.”

The emergence of the Internet as a communications medium, he noted, makes it possible for once-scattered believers to find one another. “It allows the theory to continue to exist, to continue to be available — it’s not just some old dusty books on the half-price shelf.”

Adam Savage, the co-star of the television show “MythBusters,” spent an episode last year taking apart Moon hoax theories bit by bit, entertainingly and convincingly. The theorists, he noted, never give up. “They’ll say you have to keep an open mind,” he said, “but they reject every single piece of evidence that doesn’t adhere to their thesis.”

For those who actually went — and have I mentioned that we did land astronauts on the Moon? Six times? — the conspiracy theories are simply galling.

Harrison Schmitt, the pilot of the lunar lander during the last Apollo mission and later a United States senator, said in an interview that the poor state of the nation’s schools has had predictable results. “If people decide they’re going to deny the facts of history and the facts of science and technology, there’s not much you can do with them,” he said.

“For most of them, I just feel sorry that we failed in their education.”

Did Man Really Walk on the Moon?
 
* Cover Story Did man really walk on the Moon or was it the ultimate camera trick, asks David Milne? The greater lunar lie In the early hours of May 16, 1990, after a week spent watching old video footage of man on the Moon, a thought was turning into an obsession in the mind of Ralph Rene.

"How can the flag be fluttering," the 47 year old American kept asking himself, "when there's no wind on the atmosphere free Moon?" That moment was to be the beginning of an incredible Space odyssey for the self- taught engineer from New Jersey. He started investigating the Apollo Moon landings, scouring every NASA film, photo and report with a growing sense of wonder, until finally reaching an awesome conclusion: America had never put a man on the Moon. The giant leap for mankind was fake.

It is of course the conspiracy theory to end all conspiracy theories. But Rene has now put all his findings into a startling book entitled NASA Mooned America. Published by himself, it's being sold by mail order - and is a compelling read. The story lifts off in 1961 with Russia firing Yuri Gagarin into space, leaving a panicked America trailing in the space race.

At an emergency meeting of Congress, President Kennedy proposed the ultimate face saver, put a man on the Moon. With an impassioned speech he secured the plan an unbelievable 40 billion dollars. And so, says Rene (and a growing number of astro-physicists are beginning to agree with him), the great Moon hoax was born.
Between1969 and 1972, seven Apollo ships headed to the Moon. Six claim to have made it, with the ill fated Apollo 13 - whose oxygen tanks apparently exploded halfway - being the only casualties.

But with the exception of the known rocks, which could have been easily mocked up in a lab, the photographs and film footage are the only proof that the Eagle ever landed. And Rene believes they're fake. For a start, he says, the TV footage was hopeless. The world tuned in to watch what looked like two blurred white ghosts gambol threw rocks and dust. Part of the reason for the low quality was that, strangely, NASA provided no direct link up. So networks actually had to film "man's greatest achievement" from a TV screen in Houston - a deliberate ploy, says Rene, so that nobody could properly examine it.

By contrast, the still photos were stunning. Yet that's just the problem. The astronauts took thousands of pictures, each one perfectly exposed and sharply focused. Not one was badly composed or even blurred. As Rene points out, that's not all:

*The cameras had no white meters or view ponders. So the astronauts achieved this feet without being able to see what they were doing.

*There film stock was unaffected by the intense peaks and powerful cosmic radiation on the Moon, conditions that should have made it useless. McGrath

*They managed to adjust their cameras, change film and swap filters in pressurized clubs. It should have been
almost impossible to end their fingers.

Award winning British photographer David passer is convinced the pictures are fake. His astonishing findings are explained alongside the pictures on these pages, but the basic points are as follows:

*The shadows could only have been created with multiple light sources and, in particular, powerful spotlights. But the only light source on the Moon was the sun.

*The American flag and the words "United States" are always brightly lit, even when everything around is in shadow.

*Not one still picture matches the film footage, yet NASA claims both were shot at the same time.

*The pictures are so perfect, each one would have taken a slick advertising agency hours to put them together. But the astronauts managed it repeatedly.

David Persey believes the mistakes were deliberate, left there by "whistle blowers", who were keen for the truth to one day get out. If Persey is right and the pictures are fake, then  we've only NASA's word that man ever went to the Moon. And, asks Rene, why would anyone fake pictures of an event that actually happened?
The questions don't stop there. Outer space is awash with deadly radiation that emanates from solar flares firing out from the sun. Standard astronauts orbiting earth in near space, like those who recently fixed the Hubble telescope, are protected by the earth's Van Allen belt. But the Moon is to 240,000 miles distant, way   outside this safe band. And, during the Apollo flights, astronomical data shows there were no less than 1,485 such flares.

John Mauldin, a physicist who works for NASA, once said shielding at least two meters thick would be needed. Yet the walls of the Lunar Landers which took astronauts from the spaceship to the moons surface were, said NASA, "about the thickness of heavy duty aluminum foil". How could that stop this deadly radiation? And if  the astronauts were protected by their space suits, why didn't rescue workers use such protective gear at the Chernobyl meltdown, which released only a fraction of the dose astronauts would encounter? Not one Apollo astronaut ever contracted cancer - not even the Apollo 16 crew who were on their way to the Moon when a big flare started.

"They should have been fried," says Rene. Furthermore, every Apollo mission before number 11 (the first to the Moon) was plagued with around 20,000 defects a-piece. Yet, with the exception of Apollo 13, NASA claims there wasn't one major technical problem on any of their Moon missions. Just one effect could have blown the whole thing. "The odds against these are so unlikely that God must have been the co-pilot," says Rene. Several years after NASA claimed its first Moon landing, Buzz Aldrin "the second man on the Moon" - was asked at a banquet what it felt like to step on to the lunar surface.

Aldrin staggered to his feet and left the room crying uncontrollably. It would not be the last time he did this. "It strikes me he's suffering from trying to live out a very big lie," says Rene. Aldrin may also fear for his life. Virgil Grissom, a NASA astronaut who baited the Apollo program, was due to pilot Apollo 1 as  part of the landings build up. In January 1967, he hung a lemon on his Apollo capsule (in the US, unroadworthy cars are called lemons) and told his wife Betty: "if there is ever a serious accident in the space program, it's likely to be me."

Nobody knows what fuelled his fears, but by the end of the month he and his two co- pilots were dead, burnt    to death during a test run when their capsule, pumped full of high pressure pure oxygen, exploded. Scientists couldn't believe NASA's carelessness - even a chemistry student in high school knows high pressure oxygen is extremely explosive. In fact, before the first manned Apollo fight even cleared the launch pad, a total of 11 would be astronauts were dead. Apart from the three who were incinerated, seven died in plane crashes and one in a car smash. Now this is a spectacular accident rate.

"One wonders if these 'accidents' weren't NASA's way of correcting mistakes," says Rene. "Of saying that some of these men didn't have the sort of 'right stuff' they were looking for." NASA won't respond to any of these claims, their press office will only say that the Moon landings happened and the pictures are real. But a NASA public affairs officer called Julian Scheer once delighted 200 guests at a private party with footage of astronauts apparently on a landscape. It had been made on a mission film set and was identical to what NASA claimed was they real lunar landscape.

 "The purpose of this film," Scheer told the enthralled group, "is to indicate that you really can fake things on the ground, almost to the point of deception." He then invited his audience to "come to your own decision about whether or not man actually did walk on the Moon". A sudden attack of honesty? You bet, says Rene, who claims the only real thing about the Apollo missions were the lift offs. The astronauts simply have to be on board, he says, in case the rocket exploded. "It was the easiest way to ensure NASA wasn't left with three astronauts who ought to be dead," he claims, adding that they came down a day or so later, out of the public eye (global surveillance wasn't what it is now) and into the safe hands of NASA officials, who whisked them off to prepare for the big day a week later.

And now NASA is planning another giant step - project Outreach, a 1 trillion dollar manned mission to Mars. "Think what they'll be able to mock up with today's computer graphics," says Rene Chillingly. "Special effects was in its infancy in the 60s. This time round will have no way of determining the truth." Space oddities

*Apollo 14 astronaut Allen Shepard played golf on the Moon. In front of a worldwide TV audience, Mission Control teased him about slicing the ball to the right. Yet a slice is caused by uneven air flow over the ball. The Moon has no atmosphere and no air. *  A camera panned upwards to catch Apollo 16's Lunar Lander liftingoff the Moon. Who did the filming? *  One NASA picture from Apollo 11 is looking up at Neil Armstrong about to take his giant step for mankind. The photographer must have been lying on the planet surface. If Armstrong was the first man on the Moon, then who took the shot?

 * The pressure inside a space suit was greater than inside a football. The astronauts should have been puffed out like the Michelin Man, but were seen freely bending their joints. *The Moon landings took place during the Cold War. Why didn't America make a signal on the move that could be seen from earth? The PR would have been phenomenal and it could have been easily done with magnesium flares. Text from pictures in the article show Only two men walked on the Moon during the Apollo 12 mission. Yet the astronaut reflected in the visor has no camera. Who took the shot? The flags shadow goes behind the rock so doesn't match the dark line in the oreground, which looks like a line cord. So the shadow to the lower right of the spaceman must be the flag. Where is his shadow? And why is the flag fluttering? How can the flag be brightly lit when its not facing any light ? And where, in all of these shots, are the stars?

The Lander weighed 17 tons yet the astronauts feet seem to have made a bigger dent in the dust. The powerful booster rocket at the base of the Lunar Lander was fired to slow descent to the moons service. Yet it has left no traces of blasting on the dust underneath. It should have created a small crater, yet the booster looks like it's never been fired.

Pictures Against Landing

The top picture is one taken by NASA. Notice that the sun is in the background, yet his front side is still has light shining on it, and he also has a shadow in front of him. The second picture is a simulation of a professional photographer of what the photograph should have looked like.

Moon Landing Hoax

Ever since Apollo 11 landed two parties have been arguing if it actually happened. The people who believe that it did is the government, NASA, and MythBusters. The people who believe that Neil Armstrong Jr. and Buzz Aldrin never landed on the face of the moon, are some random people who have gone to great measures to risk nearly everything they have to prove themselves right. I have read the arguments from both sides and formulated my opinions, and if you, the reader, read the two articles above you might have, too. For me, I have to go against popular belief. I am not trying to be a Contrarian but I believe that the non-believer's case is stronger.

The Authorities as I call them, being the government and NASA, criticize the people they are fighting but rarely mention the actual topic in which they are debating. They bring up details about past groups like them and their tendencies; they criticize their adversary’s personal life and personalities. The other group on the other hand brings up tangible evidence that Apollo 11 never graced the Moon’s surface, and it was not just one piece of evidence but a surprisingly long list of them. And for me personally tangible evidence is much closer to non-fictional that intangible.

I would also like to state that just because I don’t believe that the Apollo 11 landed, I do believe that Man and the U.S. has landed on the Moon. Apollo 13 was not the only mission to land on Moon but there have been six others. So, do not fret, I am most positive that the U.S.A. has landed on the Moon.

What I say will not have an impact on the never-ending argument about the Apollo 11 hoax and the only plausible way that I see this ending is NASA coming out and admitting that Apollo 11 never landed on the Moon, if the theorists are true. We being independent human beings can formulate our own opinions such as me and believe what we want. I have chosen to side with the theorists and I know that I may be wrong, but the evidence is there and I have to believe it. I truly believe that Neil Armstrong Jr., Buzz Aldrin, and Apollo 11 never landed on the Moon.

Citations

contrast, and the still photos were stunning. Yet that's just the problem.. "Moon Landing Hoax." Welcome to HKnetworks. Hare Krishna, n.d. Web. 12 Jan. 2011.
                   <http://www.salagram.net/MoonLandingHoax.htm>.

Cosnette, Dave. "The Apollo Hoax." Cosmic Conspiracies - Europe's Largest UFOs and Aliens Database. N.p.,  10 Feb. 2009. Web. 4 Jan. 2011.
                  <http://www.ufos-aliens.co.uk/cosmicapollo.html>. 

Schwartz, John. "The Vocal Minority - Moon Landing Was a Hoax - NYTimes.com." The New York Times - Breaking News, World News & Multimedia. The New York Times, 13 July 2009. Web. 4 Jan. 2011. 
                   <http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/14/science/space/14hoax.html>.