BellaOnline Forums Education Astronomy Evidence of man's lunar explorations is revealed

Found this video fascinating Mona, it is just amazing how science has progressed in the last decades, and how much we now know about the moon and the universe.

What do you think, will this finally bring an end to those 'Produced in a Hollywood Back Lot' theories?

Moon Pictures Show Traces Left By Astronauts

People who believe in conspiracy theories don't want to know the truth. I'm sure that they will decide that there is no satellite orbiting the moon, and these photos are faked somehow.

I agree with Claybird.

People who go for conspiracies have made up their minds and only pay attention to anything that they think supports their ideas. Any evidence that is presented is ignored or deemed to be fabricated. According to them, there is evidence for their own views, but it has been suppressed. Gosh! How do they know about it if it's been suppressed, I wonder. Suppression ain't what it used to be.

Didn't we discuss this type of picture at the London gathering?

Yes, we did. There had already been some pictures taken from a higher altitude that showed something slightly darkened. I couldn't see much in them. And they certainly wouldn't be persuasive as evidence if you've decided the landings never happened.

The latest ones, taken at lower altitude, are much more interesting. (Though all fake, according to some.) Someone joked that it was a sign of the state of the economy that NASA used to have the budget to fake the Moon landings, now they can just afford to fake a few pix from a lunar orbiter. LOL

I look forward to the conspiracy theorists reasoning behind the no fly zones on the moon!

Ian, there's a good selection of them in the comments section of the article you linked to!

*checks* Oh good grief!!

Mind you back in the 80's orbiting cameras could read the number plates in the GRU and CIA car parks (in order to see who was where and when)so it's taken this long for the tech to trickle down to us.

This post brought to my mind one of my favorite cover photos from the "Weekly World News", a tabloid paper which has unfortunately gone out of business.

I guess it was 25 years or so ago when they published a plainly cropped-up photo of a B-17 Flying Fortress sitting in a crater on the moon. That's not the cover that was my favorite though.

A couple of weeks after this, the headline trumpeted "World War II Bomber Vanishes From Moon" and they showed a 'standard' picture of the moon. Undeniable proof that there was no bomber there at all. Eerie.

I'm not 100% convinced that orbiting cameras can read number plates in a car park or that they could in the 80s. Does this qualify as an urban legend - or maybe just propaganda. Besides the resolution required to see number plates, where do these people put their number plates - on the roof?

I suspect that the abilities of spy satellites have been exaggerated for various reasons. One of which is to take our minds off other forms of aerial reconnaisance which, being closer, are going to get better resolution.

Frank, that is a great story. Thank you for giving me a really good laugh. Journalists can be very inventive, can't they? (Putting it nicely)

This was back in the '80's when a good deal of what the general public today would call ordinary technology ie: cameras that are practically the size of a pin head, computer programs that could 'mosaic' clear bits of photographs through atmospheric distortion, digital photography eliminating film 'grain', Were still on the secret list. Anything under 60 degrees declination can get you a pretty good picture of the number plate.

Because of this 'high tech' human gathered information was considered a bit old fashioned and many intelligence agents were let go. By the time it was discovered how easy technology was to fool most had set up in independent bureaus and the governments had to hire them back at 2-3 times their old pay rate with better contracts!

Nowadays what used to be done with orbiters is now done with saucer-shaped balloons at 60'000 foot. Less camera distortion, less cost, easier to retrieve, and they can be moved to a new location a lot quicker than altering orbits.

A Witch friend sent me this on current near-space tech

Thanks, Ian. Some interesting material there.

Sorry to be a kill joy, and I never subscribe to conspiracies usually. But there is so much evidence prooving that it was a hoax, I don't see how anyone could say it wasn't. I've never seen a list of why all these things which shouldn't have been happening - were happening from NASA. Or anyone else.

If someone could enlighten me by providing evidence of why the flag was blowing in a breeze etc. etc. etc. - I'm completley open minded. At this moment though, I think it was a hoax just so the US could say they beat Russia.

LOL Frank -- I used to love that "newspaper". I always thought writing for them would be the perfect job. All through college, I had a center spread hung up on my wall -- Atlantis Found in Lake Erie! Growing up in NY, I was thrilled to have lived so close to such a legendary city all my life without knowing it ;-)

Steve, thanks for your posting. I will come back on this, but am pushed for time now. But can I leave you with two questions to consider meantime ....

(1) It was the height of the Cold War. What were the Russians doing when the Americans were claiming to have put men on the Moon? Not just once, but six times? No monitoring, no space experts, no spies?

(2) The flag is easy. Quite right, there couldn't be any breeze, so the flag couldn't be blowing in it. But it did move for a bit. This tells us that

either

there is a reasonable explanation for the movement -- yep, see end of posting-

OR

that we're considering a load of folk clever (& dangerous) enough to shut up a whole heck of a lot of people and fool the world - including the Soviets - about going to the Moon, but didn't have the good sense to do a retake if a breeze caught the flag.

(BTW if it were a sound stage, where did the breeze even come from?)

As it happens, the American program The Mythbusters shows how a flag can wave briefly in a vacuum. (I've been camping and wrestled with tent poles, can really picture it.) Mythbusters Moon Hoax Flag Flapping

Mythbusters should be re-named to "we don't believe in anything paranormal" IMO LOL. Some of them can be SO rude to people, that Chinese woman never believes in anything. I thiunk if a ghost slapped her in the face she'd say she'd imagined it LOL.

Yeah, but there's SO much stuff about the moon landing footage which is wrong. I'm not saying it is fake - but I would never say it was real either.

I believe that out of the entire world. The US and UK giovernments are the most dangerous, annoyingly because we keep following the lead of the US - like with this ongoing war. Which everyone knew we'd get as soon as Bush got "voted" in. I think they're very dangerous.

For example, how come with all of the USA's info they couldn't stop two planes on 9/11? No-one can say this did happen, and no-one can say it didn't. But I can say that the Government are very powerful and very dangerous and do not care a jot about you or me.

I got a quote back at you from Russia about the moon landings - just for fun. I'm trying to point out none of us know for sure either way. "the Soviets did not have the capability to track deep spacecraft until late in 1972, immediately after which, the last three Apollo missions were suddenly canceled."

President Kennedy's 1961 promise of "achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth" put huge pressure on NASA. With all the known and unknown hazards, NASA would not have risked the public humiliation of astronauts crashing to their deaths on the lunar surface, broadcast on live TV.

The "landings" also helped the US government because they were a popular distraction from the Vietnam War; and so manned landings suddenly ended about the same time that the US ended its role in the Vietnam War.

There's SO much you could say for why the US Government would have faked the landings. It's not like JFK was an upstanding citizen who never told lies - the whole family was riddled with them.

Steven, I'm having some trouble here working out what your points are exactly.

(1) Are you saying the Mythbusters demo was faked? Because it's just what I'd expect in the absence of air resistance. So someone says it's a flag in the breeze? That doesn't mean it makes sense.

(2) But you say that �there's SO much stuff about the moon landing footage which is wrong� without even giving examples, so can't comment. Though evidence, rather than assertion, would be even better.

(3) Your quote "the Soviets did not have the capability to track deep spacecraft until late in 1972,� is meaningless unless we know who said it and how knowledgeable (s)he is.

But I searched and found it was attributed to Bart Sibrel. I further searched and found that he is a taxi driver, an amateur film-maker, got arrested for an altercation over a parking space and provoked Buzz Aldrin enough to get thumped. I won't comment on any of this � just found it on the Internet � but didn't find anything that suggested that he had any expertise about the Soviet Space Program.

Anatoly Zak, who is an expert on the Soviet Space Program, says the Soviets were trying to put a man on the Moon. And we know that they launched at least a few dozen probes up to July 1969 - did they really send all this stuff off without being able to track any of it? (source: Russian Space Web)

(4) I agree that politicians lie. I daresay JFK wasn't an exception, though in mitigation, I will say that he'd been dead for nearly five years before Apollo 11 landed. BTW Whether or not Moon landings helped the US Govt, doesn't tell us anything about whether they happened or not.

I can't be bothered in all honesty LOL listing everything that points to it being a lie because it was like a mile long - and for every part of it, there's a counter argument. I might list it all - but I can't be bothered ATM.

The more I've read about it though, the more I think it was a lie. But maybe it wasn't as I originally said. One thing I do think is that it was a huge waste of tax payers money - and then they get there and don't stick a flag up representing Earth - they stick the American flag up LOL - like they own the moon, it's all so phoney and staged.

I'm saying I don't like that Mythbusters show because they have a strong sense of not believing anything is paranormal. They're all also American which would make them bias.

in answer to you 4, of course it does - don't you find it fishy that they stopped as soon as the Vietnam War did? That as soon as Russia was starting to go up they also stopped their last three missions?

Mona, I'm open minded about it - but it's funny that you're closed minded that it could've been faked I think, it's ironic at least.

The Apollo program is a matter of historical record � extensively documented with paperwork, equipment, training, witnesses, photographs, films, moon rocks, and mission telemetry (the signals from the spacecraft). Taken together, this forms a consistent historical narrative.

So if someone suggests that it (or any other historical event) was faked, then substantial evidence and a counter-narrative is needed. That's the way this works. An ad hoc list � even if a mile long - of ignorant, inconsistent or just plain wrong assertions is not evidence. The moon-hoaxers have many narratives, making it look more like a fishing expedition than an analysis.

I see that Steven's example of the flag still seems to be a major hoaxer objection, even though it's a pretty simple bit of physics.

Moon-hoaxers say: The flag moved because it was blowing in the breeze. Since there's no wind on the Moon, they were actually on Earth.
The only fact in this objection is �the flag moved,� as the rest is interpretation.
The scientific explanation is that because they were on the Moon, the flag moved for awhile after the astronauts put it in place because there was no air resistance to slow it down. This was demontrated in a vacuum chamber on the link I gave.

The moon hoax narratives are based on the US faking the Moon landings in order to win a propaganda victory over the Soviets during the Cold War. So as a little test of the consistency of this narrative, if you were making the moon landing film and an Earthly breeze blew your flag, would you
A. ignore it because no one else would notice;
C. reshoot the scene.
I sure know which I'd do!

A second example of non-evidence is the assertion that the Soviets couldn't check up on Apollo because they couldn't track in deep space. By 1969 they had several successful Moon probes and a Venus probe. Do you actually think they sent off all these probes and couldn't track them? How were they expecting to get the data back?


Oo. Oo. Ouch. Hard ball.

Being open minded involves a willingness to accept new evidence - this is what learning is. But I'm afraid that I'm still waiting for some actual evidence.

May I add this to the lunar discussion?

PS Bwhaahahahaha!

Ian, my computer got stuck a few minutes into the video and refused to play any more. However I did read the first page of comments and this one caught my eye:

Ever wonder why we *don't* see the back side of the moon when everything else in the universe spins on it's axis??

Um, well, as a matter of fact, now that you mention it, I don't ever wonder that. Probably because the Moon does turn on its axis. But it takes the same time to orbit once as it does to turn once on its axis. This is why we always see the same side of it. If it didn't turn on its axis, we'd see all of it at some point. (BTW this is easily demonstrated with a globe and some volunteers.)

The Moon's orbit and spin are locked together in what's called tidal locking. This is common in the universe. Jupiter's four main moons are tidally locked and so are many of the moons of the other gas giants, plus extrasolar planets to their stars and indeed close binary stars.

But I'll try again with the video another time. Don't want to miss my big chance to see what NASA and the Russians are hiding from us.

bored now

Ah,teenagers. Gotta love em.

That took you long enough LOL. I am bored with this conversation now, it's like talking with a religious fanatic - you can't change their views no matter what, can't even open their mind to the possiblity - which was all I was saying. One can't say anything such as we're discussing is a definite. Well, you can - and you do, and you did LOL, so forget it.

If the teenager thing is aimed at me, I'm afraid you're wrong. I like teenagers anyway - they have a different view of the world and aren't afraid to voice their opinion usually - call me one - thanks