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Fox TV and the Apollo Moon Hoax
(February 13, 2001)
On Thursday, February 15th 2001 (and replayed on March 19),
the Fox TV network aired a
program called ``Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon?'',
hosted by X-Files actor Mitch Pileggi.
The program was an hour long, and featured interviews with
a series of people who believe that NASA faked the Apollo Moon
landings in the 1960s and 1970s. The biggest voice in this is Bill
Kaysing, who claims to have all sorts of hoax evidence,
including pictures taken by the astronauts, engineering details,
discussions of physics and even some testimony by astronauts themselves.
The program's conclusion was that the whole thing was faked in
the Nevada desert (in Area 51, of course!). According to them, NASA did
not have the technical capability of going to the Moon, but pressure
due to the Cold War with the Soviet Union forced them to fake it.
Sound ridiculous? Of course it does! It is.
So let me get this straight right from the start: this program is an hour
long piece of junk.
From the very first moment to the very last, the program is
loaded with bad thinking, ridiculous suppositions and utterly wrong
science. I was able to get
a copy of the show in advance, and although I was expecting it to be
bad, I was still surprised and how awful it was. I took
four pages of notes. I won't subject you to all of that
here; it would take hours to write. I'll only go over
some of the major points of the show, and explain briefly why
they are wrong. In the near future, hopefully by the end of the summer,
I will have a much more detailed series of pages taking on each of the
points made by the Hoax Believers (whom I will call HBs).
So let's take a look at the ``evidence'' brought out by the show.
To make this easier, below is a table with links to the specific
arguments.
Good:
That number is a bit misleading.
A 1999 Gallup poll showed it was more like
6%, a number which agrees with a poll taken in 1995 by Time/CNN.
The Gallup website [note added Feb. 19, 2007: The Gallup site has
been rearranged, and though I can no longer find this quotation, it still
jibes with what is on the site now] also says:
Although, if taken literally, 6% translates into millions of individuals, it is
not unusual to find about that many people in the typical poll agreeing with
almost any question that is asked of them -- so the best interpretation is that
this particular conspiracy theory is not widespread.
It also depends on what you mean by ``doubts''. Does that mean someone who
truly doesn't believe man ever went to the Moon, or just that it's
remotely possible that NASA faked it? Those are very different things.
Not only does the program not say, but they don't say where they found the
statistic they quote either.
Now here comes a little bit of math: the engine nozzle was
about 54 inches across (from
the Encyclopaedia Astronautica), which means it had
an area of 2300 square inches. That in turn means that the thrust
generated a pressure of only about 1.5 pounds per square inch!
That's not a lot of pressure. Moreover, in a vacuum, the exhaust from a
rocket spreads out very rapidly. On Earth, the air in our atmosphere
constrains the thrust of a rocket into a narrow column, which is why
you get long flames and columns of smoke from the back of a rocket.
In a vacuum, no air means the exhaust spreads out even more, lowering
the pressure. That's why there's no blast crater! Three thousand pounds
of thrust sounds like a lot, but it was so spread out it was actually
rather gentle.
[Note added December 6, 2001: Originally in this section I said that
the engines also cut off early, before the moment of touchdown, to
prevent dust from getting blown around and disturbing the astronauts'
view of the surface. This was an incorrect assertion; it was known
that dust would blow around before the missions were launched, and
steps were taken to make sure the astronauts knew their height above
the surface. Anyway, the incorrect section has been removed.]
This effect is called heiligenschein (the German word for halo). You
can find some neat images of it at
here, for example. This also explains another HB claim,
that many times the astronauts appear to be standing in a spotlight. This
is a natural effect of heiligenschein. You can reproduce this effect
yourself; wet grass on a cool morning will do it. Face away from the Sun
and look at the shadow of your head. There will be a halo around it.
The effect is also very strong in fine, disturbed dust like that in a baseball
diamond infield. Or, of course, on the Moon.
[Note added June 29, 2001: A nifty demonstration of the shadow filling
was done by Ian Goddard
and can be found here. His demos are great, and really drive the
point home.
Incidentally, the bright Earth in the sky will also cast shadows,
but those would be very faint compared to the ones made by the Sun.
So in a sense there are multiple shadows, but like not being
able to see stars, the shadows are too faint to be seen against the
very bright lunar surface. Again, you can test this yourself: go
outside during full Moon and you'll see your shadow. Then walk
over to a streetlamp. The light from the streetlamp will wash out
the shadow cast by the Moon. You might still be able to see it faintly,
but it would difficult against the much brighter landscape.
[Note added June 29, 2001: Again, check out
Ian Goddard's work for more about this.
Another example of the difficulty in estimating distance is due
to the shapes of the rocks on the Moon. A rock small enough
to sit down on doesn't
look fundamentally different from one bigger than your house. Humans
also judge distance by using the relative sizes of objects. We know how big
a person is, or a tree, so the apparent size of the object can be
used to estimate the distance. If we don't know how big the object is,
we can be fooled about its distance.
For an outstanding example of this, take a look at
video taken during Apollo 16. There is a boulder in the background
that looks to be about 3 or 4 meters (10-13 feet) high. About 3/4 of the
way through the segment the astronauts walk over to it. Amazingly, that
boulder is the size of a large house! Without knowing
how big the rock was when we first see it, we have no way to judge
distances. That huge rock looks like a medium sized one until we
have some way to directly judge its size; in this case, by looking at
the tiny astronauts next to it. [My thanks to Bad Reader
Martin Michalak for bringing this video to my attention. My
very special thanks goes to Charlie Duke (yes, the Charlie
Duke, Apollo astronaut and lunar lander pilot) who emailed me (!) about
the difficulty in judging distances due to not knowing the sizes
of rocks.]
I will admit the Fox program had me for a while on this one; I couldn't
figure it out. But then I got a note from Bad Reader David Bailey, who
set me straight. However, the producers of the show should have talked
to some real experts before saying such a silly thing as this.
If they had checked with the folks who run the
Apollo Lunar Surface Journal, for example, they would have been set
straight too.
NEW! (February 19, 2001):
I found a site that has an animation where
the two images of the mountain are superimposed. You need Flash for it,
but it's a great animation. The beauty of it is that you can see
changes in the mountain range due to parallax!. In other words, this
animation is support that the images are
real and are not using a fake backdrop.
The real beauty of this animation is that the person who put it together
is an HB. I like the irony of linking to that animation and using it to show
that it is indeed evidence that Apollo did go to the Moon. I love
the web!
Narrator: This shot was taped in what was purported to be the first of
Apollo 16's lunar excursions.
[Audio of John Young dubbed over clip: "Well, I couldn't pick a better
spot", actual MET of 123:58:46]
[Next, video of John Young and Charlie Duke at Station 4,
EVA-2. In reality, about three minutes after the first clip.
Fox caption "Day Two".
Click
here for the transcript and
here for the
RealVideo clip.]
Narrator: And this video was from the next day, at a
different location.
[Audio of Charlie Duke dubbed over clip: "That is the most beautiful
sight!", actual MET of 124:03:01]
Narrator: NASA claims the second location was two-and-a-half miles
away, but when one video was superimposed over the other the locations
appear identical.
[Audio of John Young dubbed over "Day Two" video: "
It's absolutely unreal!",
actual MET 144:16:30]
Narrator: Conspiracy theorists claim that even closer examination of the photos suggest evidence of doctoring.
That last line is pretty funny. The audio you hear of the astronauts
in those clips was actually all from different times than the video!
So that's why the hill looks the same. It's the same hill, and the
two clips were not taken a day apart, but from three minutes apart or so.
Again, had the program producers bothered to check their sources,
they would have received a prompt answer. That's all I did: I emailed
the editor of the ALSJ. It was pretty easy to do, and he answered me
in minutes.
[Note (July 20, 2001): My thanks again to Apollo astronaut
Charlie Duke for correcting a technical error in a previous
version of this section. After describing the above scenario
to me, he said the ascent stage of the lander was
"a sporty ride".]
I heard an account (sorry, no citation; the link has since gone dead) that
the cameras used for the ascent of the lander were fairly primitive, even
for that era (this is usually the case in space travel, where it takes extensive
testing to make sure things work properly; during that time the state of the
art advances). Even if it were visible, the flash of the exhaust
may have easily been missed by those cameras.
[Note added April 9, 2001: My original assertion about not seeing
the flame was because the Moon has no air, and we see flame from rockets on
Earth because we have an atmosphere. This does have some effect (the pressure
of air constrains the rocket exhaust and helps produce the effect we see)
but the larger reason the flame is invisible is due to the fuel used.
I gratefully thank the dozens of people who sent me email about this.]
The answer is, it isn't waving. It looks like that because
of the way the flag was deployed. The flag hangs from a horizontal
rod which telescopes out from the vertical one. In Apollo 11, they couldn't
get the rod to extend completely, so the flag didn't get stretched
fully. It has a ripple in it, like a curtain that is not fully closed.
In later flights, the astronauts didn't fully deploy it on purpose
because they liked the way it looked. In other words, the flag looks
like it is waving because the astronauts wanted it to look that way.
Ironically, they did their job too well. It appears to have fooled a lot
of people into thinking it waved.
This explanation comes from NASA's wonderful
spaceflight web page. For those of you who are conspiracy
minded, of course, this doesn't help because it comes from a NASA site.
But it does explain why the flag looks as it does, and you will
be hard pressed to find a video of the flag waving. And if it was
a mistake caused by a breeze on the set where they faked this whole thing,
don't you think the director would have tried for a second take?
With all the money going to the hoax, they could afford the film!
Note added March 28, 2001:
One more thing. Several readers have pointed out that
if the flag is blowing in a breeze, why don't we see dust blowing
around too? Somehow, the HBs' argument gets weaker the more you
think about it.
It was also disingenuous of the program to quote the Russian cosmonaut as well.
Of course they were worried about radiation before men had gone into the
van Allen belts! But tests done by NASA showed that it was possible to not
only survive such a passage, but to not even get harmed much by it. It looks
to me like another case of convenient editing by the producers of the program.
[Note added February 23, 2001: the link for the USA Today article
is now gone, so I have removed it.]
Dan Vergano of USA Today
had an article (with an interview of me) about the TV show on the
USA Today website. The print version was in the Friday, February 16th 2001
edition.
What's funny though is how that site pulls out the same tired arguments
that are easy to show wrong, yet stands by them dogmatically.
For example, Clyde Lewis, the webmaster of the site,
shows a photo of the flag waving and asks how it can
be waving; I already showed how it can appear to wave
on this page earlier. In his image, the bottom corner of the flag
is not flat, which is most likely simply residual rippling from the
astronaut's twisting the pole. Remember, without air,
there is nothing to dampen the rippling, so the flag actually can
appear to wave as if from a breeze for a few moments.
This is hardly evidence of a hoax. Lewis
goes on and on, bringing out the
radiation arguments, the no stars arguments, on and on, like these are
either new or damning, when they are neither.
Of course, I am trying to debunk the conspiracy theorists,
but unlike them, I want people to look at their evidence rationally
and critically, and not swallow it whole. It'll choke you if you do.
Finally, one last note:
If I weren't a hard-headed scientist, I'd wonder if some cosmic force were
at work sometimes. I went to a website that
creates anagrams, that is, rearranges letters in a word to spell other
words. I put in "The Bad Astronomer", and one of the anagrams was
MOON TRASH DEBATER. I think that's pretty
cool.
Note added June 17, 2004: a Bad Reader informed me that another anagram would be
NOTED SHAM ABORTER. I think that's appropriate too.
This page last modified
Thursday, 02-Oct-2008 12:14:32 CDT