21-11-2010, 03:04 PM
(This post was last modified: 21-11-2010, 04:47 PM by James H. Fetzer.)
You have asked for us to explain where you might be going wrong. That's the easy part. You are not acknowledging or responding to one devastating argument after another. You say that you read this 13-part series before. In that case, surely you realized that something is wrong, because you are making no effort at all to defeat the points that Dave McGowan has made. Let me offer a few examples so you know why it is difficult to take someone like you seriously, because, if you can't explain them away, then you are not rational with respect to your beliefs or else you are deliberately faking it, which means you are faking your beliefs about the faking of the moon hoax.
(1) Let's start in the beginning with the quote from Wernher von Braun. What does he have wrong and how do you defeat his observations?
“It is commonly believed that man will fly directly from the earth to the moon, but to do this, we would require a vehicle of such gigantic proportions that it would prove an economic impossibility. It would have to develop sufficient speed to penetrate the atmosphere and overcome the earth’s gravity and, having traveled all the way to the moon, it must still have enough fuel to land safely and make the return trip to earth. Furthermore, in order to give the expedition a margin of safety, we would not use one ship alone, but a minimum of three … each rocket ship would be taller than New York’s Empire State Building [almost ¼ mile high] and weigh about ten times the tonnage of the Queen Mary, or some 800,000 tons.”
(2) Tell us about the fake Dutch Moon rock? And you might as well explain why the Soviet samples are so different in chemical composition from ours.
I found a new source of inspiration, however, when my wife e-mailed me the recent story about the fake Dutch Moon rock, which I and many others found quite amusing, and which also reminded me that I had a lot of other bits and pieces of information concerning the Apollo project that I had collected over the nine years that have passed since I first wrote about the alleged Moon landings. After taking that first look, back in 2000, I was pretty well convinced that the landings were, in fact, faked, but it was perfectly obvious that the rather short, mostly tongue-in-cheek post that I put up back in July of 2000 was not going to convince anyone else of that.
(3) What differentiates your attitude from that Dave describes here? Is it your contention that you are being rational, even if many others are not?
A lot of people, in fact, pretty much shut down at the mere mention of the Moon landings being faked, refusing to even consider the possibility (Facebook, by the way, is definitely not the best place to promote the notion that the landings were faked, in case anyone was wondering). And yet there are some among the True Believers who will allow that, though they firmly believe that we did indeed land on the Moon, they would have understood if it had been a hoax. Given the climate of the times, with Cold War tensions simmering and anxious Americans looking for some sign that their country was still dominant and not technologically inferior to the Soviets, it could be excused if NASA had duped the world.
(4) Since Hitller knew a little about lying, if this really is a lie, what would it take as forms of proof to convince you that you are mistaken in your beliefs?
“If NASA had really wanted to fake the moon landings – we’re talking purely hypothetical here – the timing was certainly right. The advent of television, having reached worldwide critical mass only years prior to the moon landing, would prove instrumental to the fraud’s success.” Wired Magazine
Adolph Hitler knew a little bit about the fine art of lying. In Mein Kampf, he wrote that, "If you're going to tell a lie, make sure it's a really fucking big lie."
(5) How is it that, at that point in the history of science and technology, the Soviets were far ahead in the "space race", yet we were first to the Moon?
Everything the U.S. did, prior to actually sending a manned spacecraft to the Moon, had already been done by the Soviets, who clearly were staying at least a step or two ahead of our top-notch team of imported Nazi scientists. The smart money was clearly on the Soviets to make it to the Moon first, if anyone was to do so. Their astronauts had logged five times as many hours in space as had ours. And they had a considerable amount of time, money, scientific talent and, perhaps most of all, national pride riding on that goal.
(6) Why, if we have already mastered the technology, have we not exploited it to replicate our achievement? Having done it before, why no do it again?
It would be particularly easy, needless to say, for America to do it again, since we’ve already done all the research and development and testing. Why then, I wonder, have we not returned to the Moon since the last Apollo flight? Following the alleged landings, there was considerable talk of establishing a space station on the Moon, and of possibly even colonizing Earth's satellite. Yet all such talk was quickly dropped and soon forgotten and for nearly four decades now not a single human has been to the Moon.
(7) Isn't it the least bit anomalous that we keep putting off and putting off doing again something we purportedly accomplished back in the late 1960s?
To briefly recap then, in the twenty-first century, utilizing the most cutting-edge modern technology, the best manned spaceship the U.S. can build will only reach an altitude of 200 miles. But in the 1960s, we built a half-dozen of them that flew almost 1,200 times further into space. And then flew back. And they were able to do that despite the fact that the Saturn V rockets that powered the Apollo flights weighed in at a paltry 3,000 tons, about .004% of the size that the principal designer of those very same Saturn rockets had previously said would be required to actually get to the Moon and back (primarily due to the unfathomably large load of fuel that would be required).
(8) Do you actually believe that NASA "lost" the Moonwalking footage "back in the 1970s", which was surely the world's most precious strips of videos?
As it turns out, however, NASA doesn’t actually have all of that Moonwalking footage anymore. Truth be told, they don’t have any of it. According to the agency, all the tapes were lost back in the late 1970s. All 700 cartons of them. As Reuters reported on August 15, 2006, “The U.S. government has misplaced the original recording of the first moon landing, including astronaut Neil Armstrong’s famous ‘one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind’ … Armstrong’s famous moonwalk, seen by millions of viewers on July 20, 1969, is among transmissions that NASA has failed to turn up in a year of searching, spokesman Grey Hautaluoma said. ‘We haven’t seen them for quite a while. We’ve been looking for over a year, and they haven’t turned up,’ Hautaluoma said … In all, some 700 boxes of transmissions from the Apollo lunar missions are missing.”
(9) Did you realize that none of the footage broadcast was actually "live" but that it was all "displayed on a monitor and re-shot by a TV camera" first?
The fact that the tapes are missing (and according to NASA, have been for over three decades), amazingly enough, was not even the most compelling information that the Reuters article had to offer. Also to be found was an explanation of how the alleged Moonwalk tapes that we all know and love were created: “Because NASA’s equipment was not compatible with TV technology of the day, the original transmissions had to be displayed on a monitor and re-shot by a TV camera for broadcast.”
So what we saw then, and what we have seen in all the footage ever released by NASA since then, were not in fact live transmissions. To the contrary, it was footage shot off a television monitor, and a tiny black-and-white monitor at that. That monitor may have been running live footage, I suppose, but it seems far more likely that it was running taped footage. NASA of course has never explained why, even if it were true that the original broadcasts had to be ‘re-shot,’ they never subsequently released any of the actual ‘live’ footage. But I guess that’s a moot point now, what with the tapes having gone missing.
(10) Do you realize that this means the scientific community does not have data to verify the authenticity of the flights that NASA claims to have made?
Unfortunately, it isn’t just the video footage that is missing. Also allegedly beamed back from the Moon was voice data, biomedical monitoring data, and telemetry data to monitor the location and mechanical functioning of the spaceship. All of that data, the entire alleged record of the Moon landings, was on the 13,000+ reels that are said to be ‘missing.’ Also missing, according to NASA and its various subcontractors, are the original plans/blueprints for the lunar modules. And for the lunar rovers. And for the entire multi-sectioned Saturn V rockets.
Yet none of this, I take it, shakes your confidence that we really went to the Moon. There are hundreds of arguments, photographs, and other proofs that the landings were a hoax. So, just to humor me, since you have long-since read this series and apparently dismissed them in your own mind, would you be so kind as to enumerate what you take to the the dozen strongest counter arguments that are presented here and explain what McCowan has wrong? It would reassure at lot of us that you actually do know what you are talking about and not simply faking it yourself. And in the course of discussing them, you might also explain which of them, if any, were they true, would be enough to convince you that the moon landings were a hoax, after all, even though you have found it virtually impossible to believe in the past. Because if there isn't anything that could ever convinced you, that tells us that, as I suspect, you have long since abandoned rationality of belief for other ends.
Jim
(1) Let's start in the beginning with the quote from Wernher von Braun. What does he have wrong and how do you defeat his observations?
“It is commonly believed that man will fly directly from the earth to the moon, but to do this, we would require a vehicle of such gigantic proportions that it would prove an economic impossibility. It would have to develop sufficient speed to penetrate the atmosphere and overcome the earth’s gravity and, having traveled all the way to the moon, it must still have enough fuel to land safely and make the return trip to earth. Furthermore, in order to give the expedition a margin of safety, we would not use one ship alone, but a minimum of three … each rocket ship would be taller than New York’s Empire State Building [almost ¼ mile high] and weigh about ten times the tonnage of the Queen Mary, or some 800,000 tons.”
(2) Tell us about the fake Dutch Moon rock? And you might as well explain why the Soviet samples are so different in chemical composition from ours.
I found a new source of inspiration, however, when my wife e-mailed me the recent story about the fake Dutch Moon rock, which I and many others found quite amusing, and which also reminded me that I had a lot of other bits and pieces of information concerning the Apollo project that I had collected over the nine years that have passed since I first wrote about the alleged Moon landings. After taking that first look, back in 2000, I was pretty well convinced that the landings were, in fact, faked, but it was perfectly obvious that the rather short, mostly tongue-in-cheek post that I put up back in July of 2000 was not going to convince anyone else of that.
(3) What differentiates your attitude from that Dave describes here? Is it your contention that you are being rational, even if many others are not?
A lot of people, in fact, pretty much shut down at the mere mention of the Moon landings being faked, refusing to even consider the possibility (Facebook, by the way, is definitely not the best place to promote the notion that the landings were faked, in case anyone was wondering). And yet there are some among the True Believers who will allow that, though they firmly believe that we did indeed land on the Moon, they would have understood if it had been a hoax. Given the climate of the times, with Cold War tensions simmering and anxious Americans looking for some sign that their country was still dominant and not technologically inferior to the Soviets, it could be excused if NASA had duped the world.
(4) Since Hitller knew a little about lying, if this really is a lie, what would it take as forms of proof to convince you that you are mistaken in your beliefs?
“If NASA had really wanted to fake the moon landings – we’re talking purely hypothetical here – the timing was certainly right. The advent of television, having reached worldwide critical mass only years prior to the moon landing, would prove instrumental to the fraud’s success.” Wired Magazine
Adolph Hitler knew a little bit about the fine art of lying. In Mein Kampf, he wrote that, "If you're going to tell a lie, make sure it's a really fucking big lie."
(5) How is it that, at that point in the history of science and technology, the Soviets were far ahead in the "space race", yet we were first to the Moon?
Everything the U.S. did, prior to actually sending a manned spacecraft to the Moon, had already been done by the Soviets, who clearly were staying at least a step or two ahead of our top-notch team of imported Nazi scientists. The smart money was clearly on the Soviets to make it to the Moon first, if anyone was to do so. Their astronauts had logged five times as many hours in space as had ours. And they had a considerable amount of time, money, scientific talent and, perhaps most of all, national pride riding on that goal.
(6) Why, if we have already mastered the technology, have we not exploited it to replicate our achievement? Having done it before, why no do it again?
It would be particularly easy, needless to say, for America to do it again, since we’ve already done all the research and development and testing. Why then, I wonder, have we not returned to the Moon since the last Apollo flight? Following the alleged landings, there was considerable talk of establishing a space station on the Moon, and of possibly even colonizing Earth's satellite. Yet all such talk was quickly dropped and soon forgotten and for nearly four decades now not a single human has been to the Moon.
(7) Isn't it the least bit anomalous that we keep putting off and putting off doing again something we purportedly accomplished back in the late 1960s?
To briefly recap then, in the twenty-first century, utilizing the most cutting-edge modern technology, the best manned spaceship the U.S. can build will only reach an altitude of 200 miles. But in the 1960s, we built a half-dozen of them that flew almost 1,200 times further into space. And then flew back. And they were able to do that despite the fact that the Saturn V rockets that powered the Apollo flights weighed in at a paltry 3,000 tons, about .004% of the size that the principal designer of those very same Saturn rockets had previously said would be required to actually get to the Moon and back (primarily due to the unfathomably large load of fuel that would be required).
(8) Do you actually believe that NASA "lost" the Moonwalking footage "back in the 1970s", which was surely the world's most precious strips of videos?
As it turns out, however, NASA doesn’t actually have all of that Moonwalking footage anymore. Truth be told, they don’t have any of it. According to the agency, all the tapes were lost back in the late 1970s. All 700 cartons of them. As Reuters reported on August 15, 2006, “The U.S. government has misplaced the original recording of the first moon landing, including astronaut Neil Armstrong’s famous ‘one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind’ … Armstrong’s famous moonwalk, seen by millions of viewers on July 20, 1969, is among transmissions that NASA has failed to turn up in a year of searching, spokesman Grey Hautaluoma said. ‘We haven’t seen them for quite a while. We’ve been looking for over a year, and they haven’t turned up,’ Hautaluoma said … In all, some 700 boxes of transmissions from the Apollo lunar missions are missing.”
(9) Did you realize that none of the footage broadcast was actually "live" but that it was all "displayed on a monitor and re-shot by a TV camera" first?
The fact that the tapes are missing (and according to NASA, have been for over three decades), amazingly enough, was not even the most compelling information that the Reuters article had to offer. Also to be found was an explanation of how the alleged Moonwalk tapes that we all know and love were created: “Because NASA’s equipment was not compatible with TV technology of the day, the original transmissions had to be displayed on a monitor and re-shot by a TV camera for broadcast.”
So what we saw then, and what we have seen in all the footage ever released by NASA since then, were not in fact live transmissions. To the contrary, it was footage shot off a television monitor, and a tiny black-and-white monitor at that. That monitor may have been running live footage, I suppose, but it seems far more likely that it was running taped footage. NASA of course has never explained why, even if it were true that the original broadcasts had to be ‘re-shot,’ they never subsequently released any of the actual ‘live’ footage. But I guess that’s a moot point now, what with the tapes having gone missing.
(10) Do you realize that this means the scientific community does not have data to verify the authenticity of the flights that NASA claims to have made?
Unfortunately, it isn’t just the video footage that is missing. Also allegedly beamed back from the Moon was voice data, biomedical monitoring data, and telemetry data to monitor the location and mechanical functioning of the spaceship. All of that data, the entire alleged record of the Moon landings, was on the 13,000+ reels that are said to be ‘missing.’ Also missing, according to NASA and its various subcontractors, are the original plans/blueprints for the lunar modules. And for the lunar rovers. And for the entire multi-sectioned Saturn V rockets.
Yet none of this, I take it, shakes your confidence that we really went to the Moon. There are hundreds of arguments, photographs, and other proofs that the landings were a hoax. So, just to humor me, since you have long-since read this series and apparently dismissed them in your own mind, would you be so kind as to enumerate what you take to the the dozen strongest counter arguments that are presented here and explain what McCowan has wrong? It would reassure at lot of us that you actually do know what you are talking about and not simply faking it yourself. And in the course of discussing them, you might also explain which of them, if any, were they true, would be enough to convince you that the moon landings were a hoax, after all, even though you have found it virtually impossible to believe in the past. Because if there isn't anything that could ever convinced you, that tells us that, as I suspect, you have long since abandoned rationality of belief for other ends.
Jim
Peter Dawson Wrote:I read them all a few years ago - do I have to read them again?
As I said at the time, it's always entertaining to see someone try to convince the world that the moon missions were faked. Entertaining, up to a point.
I don't really think his Laurel Canyon series amounts to all that much - a lot of the same kind of talent (for spinning something out of nothing) was required to turn both his LC series and his Moon series into compelling reads.
(later...)
Okay, I've poked around some of his Moondoggie pieces again. Then I found myself at Wiki looking at the pre-Apollo 11 missions, like Apollo 8. I recommend other people do the same, especially those inclined to believe the hoax theory - you owe it to yourselves and the world.
There seems to be 2 trends which are making hoax believers more prevalent these days - laziness and shame. I'm too lazy to spend a lot of time answering all the moon hoax arguments, but a lot of people are so lazy these days that they can't credit other people in the past with having been smart enough to successfully do the moon missions. That's the "laziness" trend. And McGowan talks about people being too scared to accept the truth that the missions were faked, but the larger story to that is that Americans have taken quite a few blows to their pride over the years - from having their president knocked off by their own people, to finding out at long length the underhanded ways the US has sought to protect it's percieved interests in world affairs over the years, to 9/11 looking more like an inside job the closer you look at it - and they're tempted to jump to the conclusion that the landings were faked because faking of the landings would at this point seem to be more in keeping with the style in which it turns out America is inclined to do things. But it isn't necessarily so.
