Which part of “Moon landing” do you not get?
I’ve been reading a lot about Apollo lately — the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11 is almost upon us — and of course the Moon is in my thoughts anyway with the advent of NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter now snapping away as it circles our cosmic neighbor.
I’ve done some interviews about this, and been asked about it endlessly: will the LRO’s incredibly high-resolution images of the lunar surface, including, eventually, the Apollo landing sites, finally quell the lunacy of the Moon Hoax believers?
That would be nice, but obviously it won’t. If they don’t believe the thousands of pictures and video taken from the lunar surface by the Apollo astronauts themselves, why would they believe further NASA evidence? And besides, these true believers don’t live in an evidence-based world. They live in fantasy; it’s the only way they can be shown solid proof their claims are wrong and yet still cleave to them.
I could go into details, but happily the Cumbrian Sky blog already makes these points pretty well.
As for me, I will be happy to sit back and reminisce about Apollo, look over the new LRO imagery, and think about the future of space exploration with some optimism (and fight for the progress to be done rationally!), all the while ignoring the ignorant bleatings of the Apollo deniers. Sixty years from now, when people are celebrating the centenary of the first human to set foot on another world, I think the Hoax will be so long dead and gone that they won’t even know enough to ask, "Sibrel who?"
That’s a future I can look forward to.
Here, Here!
I heard a story on NPR this morning about a co-worker of Neil Armstrong auctioning off a $10.50 check that Mr Armstrong wrote to him before launch day. It was for a minor debt and he wanted to make sure the gentleman was remunerated just in case he did not make it back from the moon. It would appear, when Neil got back from the moon he paid in cash and did not request the check back!!
Kinda off topic but it is Moon Week !
People will believe in the moon landing hoax, until travel to the moon becomes routine. I think the hoax myth is still out there because it is still awesome and amazing. Once moon landings are mundane, there will be nothing else to fuel the mystery. I guess that’s one good thing about the myth. The moon landing is still so incredible, that some people just can’t believe we did it.
People can’t believe it was done in 1969, with the technology of the time, and in the Cold War context when propaganda was everything.
The funny thing is that it is because of the Cold War that we can be sure that we went to the moon. The USSR would have absolutely LOVED that propaganda bomb of calling bullshit on a hoax like the moon landings. Of course, the conspirators will just claim that the US and USSR were really working together.
I wonder if there really is a substantial number of people who the moon landing was fake? I don’t know anyone in my life who believes the moon landing was fake. They may believe in astrology, homeopathy, and ghosts … but they all are convinced we went and landed on the moon.
CW, I have a co-worker whose whole family thinks that the moon landings were faked. She was half-convinced herself until I started talking to her about it.
@CW
Hanging out with a lot of people who smoke pot during my life has led to encounter -many- people who either think it was a hoax, or who are very skeptical about the official story.
It permeates our cultures more than one thinks. Check out Rammstein’s music video of “Amerika” for a perfect example.
“People will believe in the moon landing hoax, until travel to the moon becomes routine. ”
Well, global travel is now routine, but we still have flat-Earthers. :(
Actually that shows the difference between America and Germany.
Spiegel.de just brought out an article (German), illustrated with 38 pictures and videos, walking every mere mortal through many of the hoax ideas.
I hope it gets translated to the English language version. But I suspect one of the many translation sites will help the language underprivileged.
Phil is however right. There is absolutely no chance that any images from current missons will dispel the idea that men weren’t on the moon.
Anything can be faked. I could probably produce “convincing” images myself. The hoax believers will believe until there is a museum on the moon that lets people walk by the footprints themselves. The problem will solve itself. But it will take a while.
The Cumbrian Sky blog that Phil mentioned already shows a fake picture of what the LRO might see.
http://cumbriansky.files.wordpress.com/2009/07/apollo15.jpg
“That fascinating picture is the work of one of my image mage friends on unmannedspaceflight.com, AndyG. Andy very cleverly simulated LRO’s view of the Apollo 15 landing site by taking a frame from the 16mm camera’s footage of the Apollo 15 ascent module and giving it the same resolution as LRO’s camera, approx 15cm per pixel.”
Perhaps off topic a bit – maybe not: I never understood the “Moon Buggy” sequence that was thrown into part of the super-secret-underground-desert-bunker scenes in the James Bond film, “Diamonds are Forever” Remember the part where Bond stumbles into a huge stage set that looks like a lunar landing? He steals their moon buggy and we are treated to another car chase after that brief two or three second cut. I wonder if that bit of silliness contributed in some cultural (subliminal…?)way to the hoax belief in a faked landing? I always wondered what the writers were trying to say there. That was 1971. Then of course there’s 1978’s “Capricorn One,” which really took the whole conspiracy thing to crazier limits with O.J. as an astronaut.
I agree that landing site photos won’t convince the hardcore deniers, but it might serve to convince the man-on-the-street whose view is somewhere in the maybe we did / maybe we didn’t camp.
And for the rest of us, it’ll just be very very cool.
Denial conspiracy nutjobs have always existed. I’ll bet Columbus, Magellan, Cook, et al, had their doubters when they returned to port.
The key factors to moon landing denial conspiracy theorists, despite all evidence to the contrary, have little to do with the actual evidence or anything else connected to the Apollo moon landing. Two things converge to perpetuate the deniers: (1) their thin numerical prevalence, motivated as they are by one or another of the theories on how and why they’re like they are, and (2) the internet.
Using the US as a model, there really aren’t that many moon landing deniers factored against a population of 300 million or so people. They probably share a total number with all sorts of truly wacky folks. The root motivations for the moon landing deniers are not external, for there is zero credible evidence for it. The motivation is internal, within the individual denier and serving some personal need. The distribution of their small number would be widespread, all over the country, one guy here, another there. You didn’t see any ‘the moon landing was a hoax!’ nonsense on TV or in newspapers for 20-25 years after the 1969 Apollo landing. Those who believed it never happened were isolated, with no way to locate one another except by chance or persuasion of a friend. And then came the internet.
As the internet blossomed during the 1990s, moon landing deniers found each other and could communicate with their formerly isolated fellow believers, websites went up, clubs were formed, message boards, etc., and the process of communal reinforcement set in, followed by self-imposed isolation from sane people to allow willful ignorance. Other conspiracies found their public square on the internet too and likewise grew – JFK assassination CTists, holocaust deniers, Elvis lives! freaks, etc.
There are many websites that go through the whole moon landing hoax scenario and debunk each and every point. They sing to the choir. For the moon landing deniers, it isn’t about the evidence. Something inside them drives their beliefs. There will be moon landing deniers forever, or at least until we put humans on some other object in space, and then they’ll forget the moon and deny that.
It is for this reason and others that I strongly recommend we dismantle the internet. It’s just not working out at all like we’d hoped.
“It is for this reason and others that I strongly recommend we dismantle the internet. ”
I’m sorry, Lt. Col. Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.
That gave me chills to read that. STOP IT.
Daisy Daisy…..
I’m really hoping that this is the sort of thing that will dwindle in a generation or two. I think that 40 years ago there probably was a much larger number of persons who doubted the lunar landings, but, as Devil’s Advocate said, there was easy way to communicate or distribute their misconceptions, short of poorly photocopied manifestos. The internet has allowed a smaller number of wackos to be louder than the greater numbers of the past. As the Original Conspiracy Theorists die out and more solid evidence (like pictures from the LRO) is available to the masses there will be fewer and fewer persons willing to swallow the conspiracy theories.
As long as there are humans there will be those who have the internal motivations, whatever they are, to adhere to baseless conspiracy theories. There is a personal benefit to the belief, however pathological that might be, and there is little negative consequence for the belief, because internet anonymity and communal reinforcement preclude it, that is, the believer may hide the conspiracy belief from all except those who share it.
I wonder if people will even care that we went to the moon, 40 years from now? That is, if we sit on our laurels and don’t make an effort to go back to the moon or to Mars, then I could envision where most people will be just indifferent to the historic feat.
I suspect that the younger folk among us are already indifferent to it. I have never heard anyone under 30 show any amount of awe for that amazing feat. To them it is just another boring piece of History ( for the most part). Maybe it has to do with the fantastic abilities of movie makers using CGI to create virtually anything that the imagination can conceive of. A mere jaunt to the lunar surface is so ho hum compared to what Hollywood can do.
By the same logic, a mere moon landing hoax looks like a B movie compared to what Hollywood can do.
Little known fact: Industrial Light and Magic and Pixar were spin offs from the government’s secret project ‘Moon Landing’ ;-)
But then how will skeptics find each other and communicate with their formerly isolated fellow skeptics?
Do any moon landing deniers accept crop circles and grainy photos as evidence of alien UFOs?
It’s an odd artifact of the general paranormal franchise that a person who believes wholeheartedly in bigfoot will laugh at those silly UFO believers, and a dyed in the wool alien abduction believer will look down his nose at those ignorant psychic believers. When you consider that the evidence for each of the various paranormal claims is roughly the same – very poor – it’s a clearcut indication that the belief is based on something other than the evidence, that there is something about UFO claims that attracts one person, but repels another, something about ghosts that serves one’s needs, but not another’s.
As for me, I believe in the five-day weekend.
I still think some evidence for the moon landing comes from the USSR.
1: They must have believed it to be legite or else they would have promptly called it a fake and pointed out the “evidence” supporting that claim.
2: They could have turned around and faked their own landing shortly after ours. Did they not think of that, or did they see it as pointless?
Aha! They didn’t call it a fake officially, but maybe they spread all these rumors for useful idiots to run with :-p
The problem is educational.
People with poor knowledge of the scientific method need more direct evidences.
They can read to Cervantes but they can not understand physical principles.
Probably they would not be able to argue the shape of the earth.
We can to explain to explain to explain, but we talk another language.
It is a hard job.
I don’t think any amount of proof will convince some people. There is still a flat-earth society (and it didn’t appear to be a spoof).
Some nice high res images of the moon showing the lunar modules and footprints.
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/LRO/multimedia/lroimages/apollosites.html
On a lighter note, The Daily Week (satire) claims that the Apollo landings were faked… on Pluto.
http://dailyweek.com/stories/20090720_pluto/pluto.html