The Internet is polluted with craziness, and there is no better example than YouTube. If you’ve ever wondered what would happen when you give everyone on the planet the power to show everyone else on the planet their innermost thoughts, desires, and insane ramblings, you need only look at YouTube.
One of the biggest offenders of incoherent ramblings is the subject of spaceflight. Simply search ‘space shuttle’ on YouTube, and you’ll find accusations of the crew of Columbia being abducted by aliens. Crazy, incoherent, and somewhat insulting. Accusations of a moon landing conspiracy are unavoidable in the ‘related videos’ section and are similarly filled with videos from people with either a tenuous grasp of reality or too much time on their hands.
A broken clock is right twice a day, a broken calendar is right every twenty-eight years or so, and every once in a while, simply from the volume of videos on the subject, one conspiracy theorist will present a new and novel idea. Here we present perhaps the only moon landing conspiracy theory that makes sense, is consistent with physical laws, and that may actually be true.
Comparing other government conspiracies
One of the best ways to figure out what it would take to pull off a project is to compare it to earlier, similar projects. If you’re building a 100-storey skyscraper and need a good idea of how long construction will take, just look at how long it took to build the last 100-storey skyscraper. If you want to build a dam and wonder how much it will cost, just look at earlier, similar dams that used the same construction methods and materials.
The Apollo moon landing conspiracy contends that 400,000 government workers and contractors would need to keep quiet, and no inquisitive journalists would be out in the trenches, digging for the truth. This government conspiracy would ostensibly be headed by none other than Richard Nixon, and fortunately we have a pretty good analog to compare a moon landing conspiracy to other Nixon-era conspiracies. Watergate-gate, with far fewer people involved, was found out. It strains credibility that a conspiracy many orders of magnitude larger would not be uncovered.
Additionally, there are many other nefarious activities sponsored by the US government that have been made public. The MK Ultra experiments dosed hundreds of people including Ted Kaczynski and Sirhan Sirhan with LSD. Not all of the records were destroyed, though, and the entire experiment was disclosed in 1977 with a FOIA request. The US Public Health Service infected people with syphilis, and the CIA is responsible for overthrowing dozens of governments around the world. All of these conspiracies were eventually found out. The very idea that researchers, academics, and journalists are unable to pierce the veil of a moon landing conspiracy over forty years strains credibility.
There is one government project on the scale of the Apollo moon landing that was, for a time, secret: the Manhattan Project. With perhaps 300,000 people involved in the creation of the first atomic bombs, it is the only secret government project with the same scale as NASA in the 1960s. Here, history tells us that secrets that big don’t stay secret for long, with the Soviet Union receiving plans for atomic weapons before the end of the war.
In comparing the scale of an Apollo moon landing conspiracy to other, real conspiracies committed by the US government, the argument completely falls apart. The Tuskegee syphilis experiments involved perhaps a few hundred people. The MK Ultra experiments perhaps a few thousand. Watergate-gate involved less than one hundred. An Apollo moon landing conspiracy would involve nearly a half million over the course of ten years, yet moon landing conspiracists say the largest conspiracy of all time would be the one that succeeded. It doesn’t strain credibility – it completely destroys it.
What then, do the conspiracy theorists say?
Doubt about the reality of men landing on the moon began well before July 20, 1969. In his 2004 autobiography, Bill Clinton told a story about his first encounter with a moon landing denier. A month after Apollo 11’s return from the moon, an “old carpenter” said he didn’t believe it for a minute. After all, “‘them television fellers’ could make things look real that weren’t.”
While doubt is one thing, an argument is another thing entirely. In 1976, this argument would be crystallized in Bill Kaysing’s self published book, We Never Went to the Moon: America’s Thirty Billion Dollar Swindle.
From 1956 until 1963, Kaysing worked as a technical writer at Rocketdyne, manufacturer of the first stage F-1 engines used in the Saturn V rocket that launched men to the moon. Although the design of the F-1 engine began around 1957, problems plagued the project. It was – and still is – the most powerful engine ever made. As such, a few problems arose involving combustion instability that would lead to failures in testing. These problems would be ironed out by the time the first F-1 engine was delivered to Marshall Space Flight Center in 1963, and in 1964 the F-1 engine was fully flight rated.
The Saturn V and F-1 engines would first be used to launch a spacecraft in 1967 with Apollo 4, an unmanned ‘all-up’ test of the full spacecraft stack. Kaysing quit Rocketdyne long before this test, selling his home, buying a travel trailer, moving to the Pacific northwest, deciding he didn’t like rain, and moving again to Santa Barbara to work in marketing and advertising. All this time, and through the Apollo landings from 1969 to 1972, Kaysing would have ‘a hunch’ that the Apollo program was not all that it appeared to be. This ‘hunch’ would eventually turn itself into a book that formed the foundation of all moon landing conspiracies. This hunch was based on early problems with the F-1 engine he was privy to. However, because Kaysing left Rocketdyne without seeing the results of design improvements, this hunch would never be corrected in the face of reality.
In his book, We Never Went to the Moon: America’s Thirty Billion Dollar Swindle, Kaysing made several arguments that pointed to a series of fake moon landings, all of which have been repeatedly disproven. These arguments include:
- There are no stars in lunar surface photographs. This can be refuted by an analysis of the exposures of the camera.
- There was no ‘blast crater’ underneath the descent stage of the lunar lander. In one sixth Earth gravity, the lunar lander weighed considerably less than the minimum weight of a Harrier or F-35B jet; you don’t see blast craters when a VTOL aircraft lands.
- Shadows in lunar surface photographs point in different directions, indicating multiple light sources were used. If multiple light sources were used, you would see multiple shadows behind each astronaut. Multiple shadows do not exist in lunar surface photographs.
- NASA lacked the expertise to put a man on the moon. In 1963, when Kaysing quit Rocketdyne, this was correct. This assertion is incorrect for 1969, as Kaysing’s knowledge of NASA’s expertise ends in 1963.
After Kaysing published his opus, the conspiracy theories would be increasingly refined by others who were equally well suited for baseless conjecture and completely ignoring evidence. It has been said by many moon landing conspiracists that if only a gigantic telescope was pointed at the moon and the descent stage of the LEM, trash, moon buggies, and footprints were visible, they would renounce everything they had ever said about NASA’s swindle of the American public and the world.
In 2009, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter was launched. It was the first spacecraft to orbit the moon low enough, and with a high enough resolution camera, to view the shadow of the American flags dotting the lunar regolith. Moon landing conspiracists have not yet shut up, despite direct evidence contrary to their beliefs. If you’ve ever needed proof confirmation bias exists, there you have it.
A funny thing happened on our way to confirmation bias
Confirmation bias is the tendency for humans to seek out and favor information that confirms beliefs, while disregarding evidence for alternative possibilities. Everyone is guilty of it to one degree or another, but moon landing deniers even more so. No amount of evidence, including pictures of the moon landing sites taken from lunar orbit, will convince them otherwise. I suspect taking a moon landing conspiracy to Tranquility Base would only convince them that someone had been there mere months before, moving props and sets from Area 51 to the moon.
Everyone is guilty of confirmation bias, though, and anything called a ‘moon landing conspiracy’ will be met with derision by most of the educated population. Even in the face of substantial evidence, many of us will disregard anything called a ‘moon landing conspiracy’. This post is an introduction to the most plausible Apollo moon landing conspiracy ever devised. It’s not a post saying Apollo didn’t go to the moon, nor is it a post saying humans lacked the technology to go to the moon in 1969. This post simply says there was an EVA on Apollo 12 that has not made it into the official record. For lack of a better name, I’m calling this ‘conspiracy theory’ the zeroth EVA of Apollo 12.
The purpose and timeline of Apollo 12
The entire purpose of Apollo 11 was laid out in 1962 by President Kennedy: by December 31, 1969, the United States would land a man on the moon and return him safely to the Earth. The Apollo 11 mission would follow this plan in the safest way possible. The Eagle would descend to the lunar surface, and Armstrong and Aldrin would spend about two and a half hours collecting rocks, planting a flag, leaving behind a few experiments, and taking a few pictures of magnificent desolation.
Going to the moon once doesn’t make much sense, though, and economies of scale still exist when you’re talking about moon rockets. At the time the Apollo 11 command module Columbia splashed down in the Pacific, nine more moon landings were planned, and there was a lot of work going on behind the scenes to ensure all of the Apollo lunar missions were efficient, safe, and would result in a treasure trove of scientific knowledge. Astronauts were trained in geology, lunar rovers that would allow exploration further from the LEM were being built, and missions were being planned to test the capabilities of spacecraft and crew.
One of the most important objectives to meet after Apollo 11 splashed down was to confirm the ability of the Apollo LEM to land at a specific location on the moon. Armstrong didn’t manage this – because the planned landing site of Eagle was covered with boulders, Armstrong piloted the craft to a smoother landing site four miles downrange. It could be said the entire purpose of Apollo 12 would be to land at a predetermined spot. Thanks to a few probes sent up several years before, NASA already had pictures from the surface of a few good landing sites. Landing next to one of these probes would ensure NASA had the capability to perform precision landings on the moon.
To prove NASA could land at a specific target on the lunar surface, Pete Conrad and Alan Bean would land their lunar module next to Surveyor 3, an unmanned surface probe that landed in 1967. Planned activities for Conrad and Bean on the lunar surface included setting up experiments, gathering samples, and most importantly proving NASA could land exactly where it wanted on the moon. Landing next to Surveyor 3 meant there would be no sharpshooter’s fallacy, and bringing back a few of Surveyor’s parts – the camera, most notably – would provide valuable data for research on materials exposed to the harshness of the lunar surface for years.
The zeroth EVA of Apollo 12
The theory of the zeroth EVA goes something like this: after piloting the lunar module Intrepid down to the surface, Pete Conrad and Alan Bean knew they were within a mile of their intended landing point, but they did not know where they were in relation to Surveyor 3. Because the only windows on the LEM faced forward, and because of the low angle of the sun, and with Surveyor 3 approximately five hundred feet behind them, there was no way to determine how close they were to the intended landing point. In order to solve this navigational problem, the crew of Apollo 12 opened the top hatch of the LEM, poked their head out, and took a look around. Approximately 20 minutes later, this ‘stand-up EVA’ was concluded, and the mission continued as planned.
There are several caveats to this theory. This ‘stand-up EVA’ isn’t a proper extra-vehicular activity. Even if this theory were true, there would still only be two official EVAs on Apollo 12. However, this process of basically opening the door and poking their head out was performed a number of times during Gemini missions, and even during Apollo missions. At all times, these were referred to as ‘SEVAs’, or stand-up EVAs. In any event, Dave Scott performed this exact same task – opening the top hatch of the LEM and taking a look around – during Apollo 15. This SEVA is recorded in the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal, making the argument of an SEVA not being noteworthy moot.
The theory of the zeroth EVA of Apollo 12 simply states that sometime within the first few hours of landing, the top hatch was opened, and an astronaut (most probably Pete Conrad), poked his head out of the LEM. Surely there must be some evidence of this, right?
The evidence of a cover up
Unfortunately, as is the case with most secrets, evidence comes from an absence of evidence. In this specific case, there is a significant absence of documentation. In the Apollo 12 Lunar Module On-Board Voice Transcript (10 MB PDF), nearly four hours of the transcript is missing. This four hours occurred right after landing, and exactly the time the zeroth EVA should have occurred. Shortly after four days, 14 hours, and 35 minutes into the mission, the transmissions from Intrepid were abruptly terminated, according to the official record.
This official record is expanded in the Apollo 12 Technical Air-to-Ground Voice Transcription (PDF), where much of the missing transcript from the On-Board Voice Transcript can be found. Still, even in this vastly more detailed document, there is a significant amount of dead air on the transcript after landing and before the first EVA. This is just enough time to perform a stand-up EVA. The crew of Apollo 15 performed their stand-up EVA in about thirty minutes. In the most complete version of the Air-to-Ground transcript, there is still about 20 minutes of dead air – more than enough time to pop the top hatch and take a look around.
There are other fragments of evidence that point to an unofficial EVA just after Apollo 12 landed. Just after the most likely time the EVA would have occurred, ground control asked Intrepid to perform comm checks on their PLSS backpacks. These PLSS backpacks – the large, boxy structure on the back of Apollo spacesuits – are one of the few ways mission control could have communicated with the crew of Apollo 12 secretly.
But why?
The idea of a secret EVA on the second mission to the surface of the moon, while the same EVA on Apollo 15 would be publicly acknowledged is, on the face of it, slightly absurd. Why would NASA acknowledge one and not the other? Surely, with Apollo 12 being broadcast live on all three TV networks, there would be significant interest in everything happening on the moon in November, 1969.
Apollo 12 was still the beginnings of lunar exploration, and simply from a PR perspective, NASA would want to demonstrate a precision landing on the moon. The landing site selection made it clear a sharpshooter’s fallacy could not occur: either Apollo 12 would land within walking distance of Surveyor 3 or it would not. By keeping one of the major goals of the mission unstated until a precision landing would be demonstrated, NASA plays both sides of the coin.
Did this actually happen?
Conspiracies are hard to pull off. Only a few dozen people knew of Watergate-gate, and this was leaked to the press. Having CIA operatives dose hundreds of people with LSD was found out. In terms of the scale of a conspiracy, the zeroth EVA of Apollo 12 is along the lines of these other famous conspiracies. Perhaps a few dozen people knew of the zeroth EVA at the time – history has shown that’s a small enough group to keep a secret for a short while, at least.
Unlike other government cover ups, the theory of the zeroth EVA of Apollo 12 has another thing going for it: it’s completely inconsequential. The feat of a precision landing on the moon, two EVAs, and partial recovery of a space probe is massive, and far overshadows twenty or thirty minutes of dead air on a radio, an astronaut popping a hatch, and taking a look outside. We’re not talking about the CIA dosing the Unabomber and Bobby Kennedy’s assassin. Even if the zeroth EVA were confirmed, it would only be a footnote in a much more engrossing story.
The most plausible Apollo moon landing conspiracy ever devised is left as an exercise to the reader. Like moon landing conspiracists, those of us who know man walked on the moon can quickly ignore anything calling itself a moon landing conspiracy.
The motive for the zeroth EVA of Apollo 12 exists, and there is ample time missing from any official record for it to happen. It’s also not a large conspiracy – less than one hundred people would ever have first-hand knowledge of this event. While it may not have happened, the zeroth EVA of Apollo 12 is by far the most interesting conspiracy theory to surface.
Thanks to LunaCognita for the inspiration for this post.
‘tenuous grasp of reality or too much time on their hands.’
Not mutually exclusive. I suspect many suffer from both simultaneously. The combination can be particularly dangerous.
Why are you even printing this?
The best thing you can do with these ridiculous conspiracy theories is ignore them.
Not if you care about clicks and eyeballs.
+1
LOL, you’re confirming what’s said in the article:
“Everyone is guilty of confirmation bias, though, and anything called a ‘moon landing conspiracy’ will be met with derision by most of the educated population. Even in the face of substantial evidence, many of us will disregard anything called a ‘moon landing conspiracy’. ”
Seriously though, it’s an interesting read. No one forces you to believe, but reading about this nonsense is as fascinating as reading about the Apollo program itself. IMO
I learned SO MUCH about appollo and space travel in general by debunking each claim of the hoax believers. After looking at… Shadows, stars in pictures, van allen radiation, landing craters, micro-meteors, 60s computer technology, people and stories like Margaret Hamilton, low-g flag dynamics, astronaut visors, space suit design and construction over time, in depth careful listening of in-flight communications, archival practices of nasa over time and their collection of media, radiation hardening of electronics, ionizing radiation and shielding.. and some others i am forgetting…
Anyway, after looking at all of these topics, I am still 100% convinced ‘we’ went to the moon, and furthermore I have all sorts of fun niche knowledge about the flights.
Read about Margaret Hamilton if you need a inspirational ‘women in tech’ story!
It is highly unlikely we went to the moon with the minuscule radiation protection and still have the Apollo crew show low earth orbit radiation levels. There is zero evidence that the flight trajectory presented by NASA actually avoided the inner belt which was never accounted for or even mentioned in the 1969 original press kit. Also the average radiation dose of the of the Apollo crew members that traveled around the moon is similar to those that remained in low earth orbit. How the hell is that possible that those in LEO experienced the similar radiation?? Also if Apollo did solve the radiation problem why is Orion not even able to send a manned craft around the moon and back?? It is absolutely asinine to think we went to the moon. You are just willfully ignorant to the obvious improbability of a manned moon landing you just want to believe in the moon landing fairy tale.
I’m sorry. What was the conspiracy here?
…weak sauce…
If American moon landing was a fake, Soviets would be the first to speak. They didn’t, and the matter is therefore resolved. Soviets were not idiots, they had the means to track the Apollo flights, using radio direction finding, and radar and optical tracking while Apollo was in Earth’s orbit.
In principle that only proves that the craft went there, not that there were astronauts inside.
But believing that would imply that the whole mission, including the docking maneuvers, the landing and all the rest could be automated. It would have actually been far easier to just send the austronauts.
I have used the Russia knowing what was happening argument before – and the conspiracy idiots counter “It’s the worldwide domination by the Jews!!!” Sigh.
The Russians tracked the radio transmissions, and the *timing* of the transmissions. They would have noticed the additional lag in conversations, and been able to tell if the transmissions were faked.
And – you are correct about the problems of automating the entire sequence.
What about if only the landing were faked? An unmanned lander, with the rest of the mission genuine? So docking would have had people in the orbiter.
And let’s say only for Apollo 11, with later missions genuine?
Possible motivation would be to beat the soviets to the surface, as they’d give up once the US had done it?
FAr fewer than 400,000 people would be involved, as most of the stuff would have been genuine.
Possible? How few people could you do it with? (Assuming no arduinos :p )
Why would the lander be unmanned when they would have had to land it, lift off again, and re-dock with the command module anyways?
If the lander was empty and had failed to lift-off from the moon, then they would have had the problem of explaining why all the crew got back home safely regardless. They would have had to somehow make Aldrin and Armstrong “dissapear” but still leave Collins alive.
Why would they do that? That would involve the creation of hardware different from what was used by all other missions. It would be easier to just send the astronauts in the spacecraft they had already developed. All involved knew there would be risks, but they were willing to take them, just like people now a days would be.
Yeah you are right, it was an idiotic idea.
If you go that far, you may as well go the extra mile and actually use the Lunar Module, since you went to the effort of getting it to the Moon in the first place. Then you get the benefit of the science you can do there, as well as being able to honestly say you did it.
My question wasn’t “is it a good idea” or “did it happen”, but the thought experiment of “could it have been done and covered up” – trying to keep the “hack” angle here…!
I doubt they could measure the lag. It isn’t as if there is a one-to-one correspondence in party being silent and the other transmitting. They could measure the direction the signal was coming from. Timing and signal strength need to be precalculated so that any discrepancy could be discovered, which means the signal could be altered to match those calculations. By using triangulation the location of the signal transmission could be determined.
They might be able to pick up the Doppler shift from the orbiter going around the moon, and presumably there’d be no shift in the transmissions from the lander. Interesting thought experiment.
You could measure the lag if there’s an echo.
Lag can be measured – it’s just a minimum value dependent on the distance. But lag can easily be faked. Echo can easily be added. Doppler shift can easily be faked. This is all child’s play. It’s a little harder to fake what direction the signal is coming from. In fact, a lot harder, especially if the monitoring party is using multiple direction finders with a baseline long enough to get a decent 3D fix. So you’d have to send SOMETHING to the moon, even if it’s just a small repeater. I’m not saying that the Russians would measure this, just that NASA would have to consider that they might.
The Apollo 13 (near) disaster was engineered to create public sympathy for the whole project. Even as soon as 13, people were disinterested in the moon “landings.” If the fat cats at NASA wanted to get rich by swindling the world, they would need to boost public engagement fast. So they hired some Hollywood writers to come up with a suspense story. One which would grip the whole world.
(joke… or is it? No really it is.. or.. is it?)
“It would have actually been far easier to just send the austronauts.”
Right, since *somebody* would need to feed the monkey….jo
You act as if the U.S. and Russia were friends at the time,
and that the U.S. would have allowed the media to tell us
what the Russians were saying, especially, if the landing Was faked.
I doubt media -even now- with all the censorship on Facebook (people are being censored)
that we would have heard ANYTHING from the Russians.
There’s no way the news WOULDN’T have gotten to us. In those days, shortwave radio was big, and while the Russians had a policy of jamming all Russian-language broadcasts from Europe, the US didn’t do so, so it would have been a red flag if they suddenly started.
Zzzzz….
Not a hack. Not informative or entertaining. Not even of consequence, by [Brian]’s own statement, third paragraph from the bottom.
And the first 60% or so of the lengthy article only describes what the article ISN’T about.
Thumbs down.
Of course it’s a hack. The hack is right there in the byline.
(rimshot)
I thought it was an interesting read.
LOL! Good one
Boom, ha ha. You have to look at both sides to find the truth, even if the opposing side is ridiculous. I’ve been a fan of conspiracy theories in younger days, but then you realize there is no way for humans to keep big conspiracies quiet. I can entertain conspiracy when it is a handful of people à la Making a Murderer.
I support this designation of “Not a hack”
I third that.
Well, it is nice to know of the latest “theory”.
The thing I find funny is these idiots cannot even get their stories straight.. They are all over the map, from “rockets cannot work in a vacuum” to “Van Allen Belt would kill them” to “Aliens did not let us land on the Moon”.
Their confirmation bias will not allow them to recognize the truth. Show them a Lunar Orbiter pictures, and they say “NASA built it, so NASA is faking it.” Point out DISH Network requires rockets to put the satellites in Geosync orbit (I used this on the “rockets don’t work in a vacuum” guy”), and his response was “signal bounces off the ionosphere”. (So do GPS signals, he said… Sigh.)
Right, but what about those rings around Uranus?
Boy, GPS would be a LOT easier if you could just bounce the signals from ground stations off the ionosphere. How do they counter the fact that you can LOOK UP IN THE SKY and see satellites, including that big mother ISS?
It’s a hack, to use Hackaday for what it’s not intended for.
actually all the props and equipment used to fake the lunar landings has been found, the sneaky bastards had it all hidden on the moon
You win the Lunar Internet.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6MOnehCOUw
Well, it’s actually true that NASA hired Stanley Kubrick to create the film of a moon landing. However, being Kubrick, he insisted on filming on location.
+1
Kubrick would have had a second moon built to his specifications. Then destroyed it to keep others from using it to make cheesy films,
but they kept it around then blew it up in Episode 4
My favorite conspiracy moon theory is “It was shot on a sound stage on Mars because the aliens would not let us land on the Moon!”
Walk up to Buzz and tell him he lies, cheats and is an all-around fraud. See if it works out better than the last guy who did that. (Snicker)
Actually I think Neil Armstrong is a bit of an ungrateful dick over his attitude. Humanity paid an utter fortune to send a few men to the Moon, and he was chosen to be one of them. One of the luckiest men alive. Of course he was brave and competent too, but there’s plenty of people like that.
And yet, “Why are you asking me about the Moon? Why does nobody ask me about my watercolours or my herb garden?”
Ungrateful dickbag owes humanity greatly, the least he can do is share his experience with people.
And I do like the stories of Buzz punching out idiots. Still, he does have the appreciation of millions of normal people. It’s just that sane people aren’t rude enough to run up to him in the supermarket and start questioning him.
50 years on you’d be a bit tired of the question.
The man doesn’t really owe anyone anything. Do you consider it a privilege to put your own life on the line?
Plenty of people would’ve gladly taken his place. Yes it’s a privilege. And he’s been like that for a long time, not just now, 47 years later. He owes everybody, or at least the Americans who paid for it. Other astronauts aren’t like that, many of them won’t shut up about their experiences.
“The man doesn’t really owe anyone anything. Do you consider it a privilege to put your own life on the line?”
People like to forget success was not a forgone conclusion – three astronauts died during a test procedure, Saturn V rockets had a habit of blowing up until just before the manned flights started…
There were definitely significant risks. You don’t give your family batches of autographed photos (as a form of life insurance) if you are sure you are coming home.
The risks were very well studied.
Apollo reliability and quality assurance program Quarterly status report, second quarter 1965
https://archive.org/details/nasa_techdoc_19790077142
Neil and Buzz were the most famous *payload* in history.
The cost:benefit ratio of sending actual humans to the moon instead of a sample-return mission was astronomical (see what I did there?). Were it not for the politics, I don’t think we would have bothered. It’s no surprise at all we’ve not been back since.
Haven’t been back since. Except for those other five times.
The Nixon administration couldn’t even keep Watergate hushed up and we’re supposed to believe that this has been kept quiet for 40 years? Please.
It’d help if there weren’t so many actual, true, conspiracies. There must be plenty of shit that politicians, presidents, and the CIA have still got away with. There’s the huge part of the budget that the CIA and NSA don’t have to declare to their government. There ARE real conspiracies, and many people in power are utter dickwads. All of that makes conspiracies more credible. The UK’s now being run on behalf of a few public schoolboys and their enormous corporate chums. The USA has something very similar.
The Moon landings one is just stupid, as well as being too gigantic to be true. But we live in a time where we expect corruption in politics. In case of a scandal, politicians used to resign immediately and without question. Now they hang on by the skin of their teeth, arguing that black is white, that they didn’t do it and even if they did it wasn’t wrong anyway, and besides that they didn’t even know.
“Fast and Furious” government gun running to Mexican drug lords and all the crap the EPA, Fish and Wildlife Service and Bureau of Land Management have been doing for decades to steal people’s land to add onto “wilderness” and “wildlife refuge” areas. http://theconservativetreehouse.com/2016/01/03/full-story-on-whats-going-on-in-oregon-militia-take-over-malheur-national-wildlife-refuge-in-protest-to-hammond-family-persecution/
Look up Sackett v. Environmental Protection Agency. They had a culvert on their property which would plug up with debris, causing water to back up. When they cleaned it out, the EPA claimed they had illegally ‘drained wetland’.
Another bunch of crap those agencies are trying to do is claim the man-made Lake Lowell near Nampa, ID is a “wildlife refuge” and all but eliminate recreational use of the 107 year old irrigation reservoir.
Doesn’t matter to the government nuts that the only reason there came to be so much wildlife in these places is because of human activity, irrigating the land and making water easier for animals to get to. When the TLAs (Three Letter Agencies) get the people driven out and destroy the man-made stuff, returning the land to a ‘natural state’ with less available water, the animals pack up and move – to the farm and ranch land outside the refuge where they don’t know they’re supposed to stay. So next step for the TLAs, do everything they can to steal *that* land from the people.
The article was talking about Watergate-gate not Watergate. I’m not sure what Watergate-gate is.
smh not sure you guys should be spreading conspiracy theories. This is beneath you.
And questioning the narrative with founded arguments is clearly above you, or just reading the whole article.
I thought that the conspiracy was that we built a fake moon in space and landed on that…
That’s no moon…
The question is: if a moon landing denier (“that’s no landing”) touches a Star Wars fan (“that’s no moon”) do they vanish in a puff of logic?
No, they write a web page, and probably a fucking Youtube video, and thousands of idiots suck it all up and…. oh, it’s so depressing!
That’s no moon – that’s a space station!
Yup. David Weber wrote alll about it. ;) http://www.baen.com/chapters/W200303/0743435931.htm
Want to know more about the zeroth EVA look up the Jade Rabbit chinese myth, I think they found alot more then they bargained for. I am definitely one of those with a ‘tenuous grasp of reality or too much time on their hands.’
The reason for filming the moon landings in a studio, was not that they did not land on the moon.
The most plausible moon conspiracy is that the government started the conspiracy rumors to discredit real and actual conspiracies. (ie mkultra, mockingbird, cointelpro, etc.)
“The most plausible moon conspiracy is that the government started the conspiracy rumors to discredit real and actual conspiracies. (ie mkultra, mockingbird, cointelpro, etc.)”
I bet they didn’t count on a bunch of nutcases with too much time on their hands figuring it all out, eh ?
What’s worse a nutcase… or an empty box?
A nutcase.
It was a rhetorical question, but thanks for playing.
Turned out there was an answer, who could’ve known?
If you put the nutcase in the box, can you tell for sure if he has a theory or not?
aah, Schrodinger’s nutcase.
So, if a nut is in a case and no one is around to hear it, does it make a conspiracy?
” I think they found alot more then they bargained for. ”
But, being one of those who has figured it all out, you decline to let the rest of us in on the details. I’m too lazy to “study it out”, won’t you please enlighten me?
lol hook line and sinker;)
A common trait of conspiracy theorists: “I know more than you do, but for reasons best known to myself, I’m only going to drop hints, rather than lay out the facts which conclusively prove my theory”
I watched the moon landings, and there’s no way in hell we could have faked it. We couldn’t hide the Pentagon Papers, Nixon *was* a crook, and Vietnam was a clusterf*ck at the end of the sixties. Now, with all that incompetence going on, you’re going to have to work awfully hard to convince me that the entire space program was faked by Stanley Kubrick on a soundstage in Hollywood., and that nobody has leaked it in the intervening 40 years.
I will admit that they did a pretty good job with the Kennedy assassination, but that was the Mafia. They know how to keep secrets. :-)
Kennedy assassination was done by Oswald, just like they said it was.
I got bored. The blue lines are mine
http://i58.tinypic.com/4h7ggn.jpg
This is not hackaday.
No more please.
WE are into hacking. and new Teck.
Maybe some Teck from Starwars or Star Trek? Or the little Rabbit trying to go threw a 4 way stop light.
AND that did happen this morning. And it did make it safely…..
“Crazy, incoherent, and somewhat insulting.”
that is not a sentence
By itself, no. It’s an adjectival phrase
In the context of a larger writing, it can be interpreted as a sentence with an implied existential verb (“is”) and the same subject as the previous text.
The practice is called ‘ellipsis’ and has a better foundation in English written language than the rules of sentence structure you’re trying to use. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellipsis_(linguistics)
If you’re going to pick at someone’s grammar, use the full set of rules (including rhetorical devices), not the over-simplified subset taught in elementary school. The latter is a thing up with which we should not be made to put.
So much blood… where does it all end?
So, the “conspiracy” is that they edited the records to make the landing look more professional? That sounds like a normal day at work for most people.
I half suspect this article is just a test to see how many commenters don’t make it to the actual conspiracy in question, and just stopped after the first few paragraphs. You obviously made it all the way through, but check out all the ones that didn’t.
(That’s my own, personal conspiracy)
The truth is that Apollo 11 was poorly engineered and broke down in space. The crew only went to the moon because by chance a (obvious skilled) Martian went by and helped them fix the mess. I know it is true, my Martian friend told me this when i visited him some time ago. Of course it’s quite an embarassing thing so the US government keeps all the information related to this secret.
And by the way, the oxygen tank from Apollo 13 exploded because of a malfunction of the misson control computer, apparently windows 0.1 had trouble with all the porn and cat pictures the crew took with them.
Seriously, this is really not an article for HaD.
If your opinion, viewpoint, or theory requires large scale conspiracy, as in moon landing hoax, 911 truthers, flat earth, etc., then you have a mental hygiene problem and this is not something that can be reasoned through. This distinction can be used to discern if it will be worthwhile pursing additional discussion and understanding of a viewpoint. In cases where it is not worthwhile because there is a mental hygiene problem, we need better tools to address that root problem instead. Reasoning and insults are not productive in this situation and as a society we are badly needing some skills to fill this gap.
Yup. People being gullible, stupid, unable to discern truth, and not knowing how to source good information (with the INTERNET!), is behind so much of what is wrong with the world.
It’s always been the case, I think, but now we have enlightenment! We CAN do better. It needs spreading.
Of course you won’t find it easy to convince the careerist, corrupt politicians who’ve cemented themselves in, that a smarter populace who are harder to mislead, would be worth pursuing. People like Rupert Murdoch actively work to keep people stupid and superstitious, bad logic, prejudiced.
But we’re never going to get to Star Trek: The Next Generation with shit like Fox News on the cable-waves, newspapers full of predigested outrage and deliberate lies, and politics stuck in ever-decreasing circles of the same narrow agendas.
Anyone’s got any ideas to smarten the populace up, or alternatively some sort of deadly virus, either way I’d be interested.
“But we’re never going to get to Star Trek: The Next Generation with shit like Fox News on the cable-waves, newspapers full of predigested outrage and deliberate lies, and politics stuck in ever-decreasing circles of the same narrow agendas.”
Uh, yeah – it’s all Fox New’s fault. Sure.
Good point. About 3% of US population have an IQ of 70 or below, and that technically makes them a moron. That is about 10,000,000 of them. How can you sanely hold anyone or any one thing responsible for that? Interestingly there is a similar number of psychopaths. Then there is the 3% who hold 97% of the wealth, so if the vast majority of people don’t own most of the wealth they can’t be spending it all either. It is amazing how many groups in the USA are about 3% of the population, so even if you take 15 of these “problematic” groups they are and a meta-group still a minority, and that is without allowing for overlaps within the groups, i.e. shared members.
It would seem that the more people make politicised generalisations the less they understand this, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BrK7X_XlGB8
–“Then there is the 3% who hold 97% of the wealth”
Money is not wealth – not directly. The 3% may hold claim to much of the actual wealth, but in reality it’s the majority of people who hold the majority of it. The rich don’t live in 33 houses and eat 33 dinners a day per person.
The difference is in the difficulty of defining value. Much of “value” is imaginary, such as copyrights and patents, debts and bonds or securities – only existing in potential and not in actuality, or existing as complete fiction and waiting for a fool to exchange it for real value.
Yes and no, they do on average own >1 homes that are not used by other people and they do eat more of the higher quality food per head than the poorest do. So I get you point but, if I am not correct because I am not 100% correct then neither are you. Anyhoo it is a side issue, not key to my main point.
How dare he not explicitly list every single piece of idiocy and exploitation in the world!
Then there’s also the curious fact that government expenditure in the US represents roughly half of the whole economy. Non-military direct spending is roughly 15% of the economy, while all-told the government – federal and local – is responsible for about 42% of all the money that’s going around.
And that money is distributed unevenly in such a manner, that the bottom 80% of people actually profit on paying tax. People like to call the rich on not paying enough tax, but the truth of the matter is that nobody actually pays ANY net tax until they’re above upper-middle-class, and the top 5% pay $17 in taxes for every dollar they take back.
What that means is, the society as it is is actually a pretty damn good deal for the general population. The only problem is, that there’s far too many people trying to just eat off the cart, and they’re all spending the money they gain in stupid ways such as driving cars that burn too much fuel, or eating too much, unhealthy foods, and turning obese and then suffering ill health and crippling healthcare bills.
We don’t turn the potential we have into actual wealth. Instead, we try to “service” each other to gain more money, which is consuming and destroying wealth. The “services economy” which is now 80% of the US market. We come up with all sorts of dog and pony shows to convince other people to give us money, rather than going out making new stuff, and that ends up in poverty in real terms rather than in terms of money because fewer and fewer people actualy input any real wealth into the system while most simply try to gain access to it by making other people consume wealth.
For example, if you’re working as a waiter in a restaurant, your job is to make other people consume energy and material resources in order to get paid. The more wealth you make other people destroy – the more excessive and extravagant the dinner you’re selling – the more money you get, and presumably the more wealth you can buy with it – except there is no wealth to be bought because you just made some idiot gulp it down his gullet.
Now imagine what happens when most people are doing the same as you – no wonder everyone’s complaining.
Fox News, and their ilk. Murdoch in general. And of course many others like him, if I thought the old fucker dying would help things I’d at least have that to look forward to.
People are stupid, sure. But exploiting that is evil, and makes things worse.
It’s not exactly a conspiracy theory, and it doesn’t attempt to disprove the landings. “Some men stuck their head out of the sunroof and the radio conversation isn’t available” is hardly earth-shaking. Either the tapes were lost, or the communications didn’t work cos of atmospherics, or 4 dozen other reasons.
I’m disappointed that a footnote was made into a whole article. Preceded by a massive prologue of stuff we already know. A misleading title. That’s clickbait.
HAD isn’t quite in the league of the endless Facebook factoid-farms yet, but it’s sliding a little that way. Can you change it back, please? Is this some pressure to get more viewers?
It’s probably counter-productive anyway. You don’t advertise on other sites, or none that I’ve seen. You’re only misleading people who came here anyway, and giving them a negative experience. How many of HAD’s visitors are regulars, how many casual? I’d guess it’s nearly all regulars. We’re an unusual crew, the usual new-media shit actively annoys most of us. Stick to what you know, HAD was good for years, it’s still pretty good now.
They’re doing it to create filler articles and subtle trolling and clickbait for people, who then complain about it on the comments section, to up the pagevisit count to make themselves seem bigger to the advertisers.
I’m surprised they didn’t try to reference Ahmed the clock ‘builder’ to really jack-up the comment count!
Ther will almost certainly never mention Ahmed ever again….
While I dont believe moon conspiracies – I do think there are many massive conspiracies that the citizens of every country have absolutely no clue about.
“Ther will almost certainly never mention Ahmed ever again….”
I’d like to believe you, but they kept dragging out more marginal ‘clock hacks’ in honor of a certain young boy from Texas, well after he was revealed for his true self.
BTW, in a recent conversation with some student’s at that notorious Texas high school I found that Ahmed was enrolled in a program called VISTA, which is a focused program intended to help at-risk students overcome personal challenges and bring them up to grade-level work and MAYBE head to college after graduation… Ahmed was not a ‘gifted’ student, he was an ‘at-risk’ student that needed extra help to get ready for college.
Yeah we (Nonamerkans) figured the real story was that the Democrats hate Texans and this was just an exercise in socio-political shiving. BTW “Shiving” is when you improvise on the spot and grab something pointy to stick in the kidneys of somebody that you hate.
If you review the various posts here about it you will see I was there agreeing with you both, well before it was at all fashionable.
Mike called me a troll.. Brian told me to be responsible with the media I consume. Sigh. Conspiracies behind every door, I tell you.
So, some things we agree on!
I’d spell that “shivving”. To shiv someone with a shiv. Most people know the word, or smart people do. Also prisoners. Way you spelled it looked like it rhymed with “skiving”.
The big question is of course: did they use a TI launchpad…
No, they used a Launchpad McQuack.
This brings another important question: who cares?
The truth is stranger than fiction. There was a genuine UFO sighting including an object within the actual Apollo 10 crew cabin, but it turns out that one of the guys had just failed to seal a bag correctly and his turd started floating around the cabin. http://www.jsc.nasa.gov/history/mission_trans/AS10_CM.PDF
page 414
LOL (also, thanks for the page number….)
Sorry, all you Utopians, but even NASA admits getting man to the moon not yet possible! Admission 1: https://youtu.be/NlXG0REiVzE Admission 2: https://youtu.be/51DED8dcNkA
You simply chose not to understand he was saying that the International Space Station can’t go through the Vsn Allen Belt, didn’t you…
“We can’t do it today (with ISS or Space Shuttles), but with SLS and Orion we soon will…” – paraphrased, from memory in second video.
The Apollo missions marked the first event where humans traveled through the Van Allen belts, which was one of several radiation hazards known by mission planners.[30] The astronauts had low exposure in the Van Allen belts due to the short period of time spent flying through them. Apollo flight trajectories bypassed the inner belts completely to send spacecraft through only the thinner areas of the outer belts. [31][32] The command module’s inner structure was an aluminum “sandwich” consisting of a welded aluminium inner skin, a thermally bonded honeycomb core, and a thin aluminium “face sheet”. The steel honeycomb core and outer face sheets were thermally bonded to the inner skin.
[30] a b Bailey, J. Vernon. “Radiation Protection and Instrumentation”. Biomedical Results of Apollo. Retrieved 2011-06-13.
[31] http://www.popsci.com/blog-network/vintage-space/apollo-rocketed-through-van-allen-belts
[32] Woods, W. David (2008). How Apollo Flew to the Moon. New York: Springer-Verlag. p. 109. ISBN 978-0-387-71675-6.
when you count complicit individuals you also have to count the surveillance apparatus of the Soviet Union and every single Warsaw Pact nation. If anyone thinks the Soviets at the height of the Cold War would’ve turned down a propaganda coup like “proving” there was no moon landing (and remember the Soviets did launch some sort of vehicle at the same time which caused the Media to go into a paranoid frenzy), they’re too far off their meds to even be listened to.
That would be a valid case of an absence of evidence disproving an invalid case that is founded on an absence of evidence.
re-entry impossible read here http://heiwaco.tripod.com/moontravel.htm
“re-entry impossible read here http://heiwaco.tripod.com/moontravel.htm”
Quite possibly the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen on the internet…
enjoy your dreams
It took me several years to establish that a re-entry after a space trip was and is not possible. One problem is to find the right location in the upper atmosphere at the right time and then to plunge into it at the right angle, etc, which Yuri Gagarin couldn’t do 1961 = he faked it. Then John Glenn did the same thing = faked it. And there we are today.
Hi Anders, didn’t expect you here. Thanks for your work, it cleared my view.
Every conspiracy site starts with Web1.0
they clearly got disconnected by a lazy or incompetent at&t operator and that is the real reason for telephone deregulation.
This is the worst article I have ever seen on this site. Really disappointing.
I’m going to stick with my initial thoughts since I came across a moon landing conspiracy that wasn’t in a comedy, if you are going to put that much money into sending someone to the moon they are going to get to the moon whether they do or they don’t, as for a backup fake being used it clearly wasn’t, but always good to have a backup lol
Conspiracies are easy; and if enough people have enough interest in covering stuff up, it’s possible. It’s been eight years; where is Barack Obama’s college transcript, or thesis, or admission records? Where are his publications? A year as editor of the Harvard Law Review, and he wrote NOTHING?
(Please note: I’m not claiming that Obama was born in Kenya; I’m suggesting that his admission records CLAIMED that he’d been born there but have been disappeared. Along with virtually all other records of his existence at Harvard.)
The Tuskegee experiment involved withholding treatment from those with known syphilis infections as well as not informing the patients they had syphilis. This originally started -before- there was a treatment for syphilis. The tragedy was it continued until well after an excellent treatment was widely available. The Tuskegee experiment did not involve directly infecting people.
But they have admitted to spraying a few small towns with non-lethal respiratory bacteria to gather data on how an aerial delivered bacterial bioweapon would spread. Might have been a few elderly with emphysema or pneumonia, or kids with cystic fibrosis that died from it, but those cases would have been quietly left out of the research data, listed as dying from their other health problems.
“Might have been…”
Equally as likely it “Might not have been…”
Tuskegee was child’s play
No but lying to people about lack of a cure is just about as evil. Weren’t all of the patients black?
“No but lying to people about lack of a cure is just about as evil. Weren’t all of the patients black?”
There’s letting people keep the syphillis the caught themselves and then there’s infecting people with syphillis – both are evil, most people would think the latter is a bit more evil.
But I agree, it is for all intents and purposes a distinction without a difference, an attempt to pick up a turd by ‘the clean end’ if you will.
Are you for real ken?
You are living walking excrement.. Blaming the victims of secret medical experiments as ‘evvil’ for being human.
Seriously – you are either 17 and just discovered Rearden Metal (Ayn Rand Acolyte?), or you are 85 and LOVE being condemnatory.
Either way you are either incompetent or a mean spirited liar. You deserve the social system this country has degenerated to.
“Are you for real ken?”
Yes.
Read what I wrote again, I called both acts evil, said that infecting someone with syphillis is more evil than denying someone treatment for their syphillis.
I never said, as you seem to think I did, that it was OK to let people with syphillis go without treatment.
You are right in that I did misunderstand your statement. I am sorry for calling you evil.
“You are right in that I did misunderstand your statement. I am sorry for calling you evil.”
No problem, it happens…
There is a perfectly valid reason for the US government committing to a Moon landing hoax. Please don’t mistakenly believe I think it is, merely I concede the following as a valid reason … because it’s the same reason other “hoaxes” have been done.
During the Cold War, lots of false activity was done by the US and NATO to confuse the Soviets into making plans which weren’t needed. The goal of a moon landing hoax ( just like the later hoax of the Star Wars Missile Defense Initiative ) would be to goad the Soviet Union into grossly overspending its budget and wasting resources … thus pushing their country into an untenable economic crisis leading to dissolution of the government.
Oh … Wait.
So, it turns out the hoax wasn’t on whether Apollo missions went to the moon — the conspiracy is rather WHY. Not that it is much open for debate anymore.
Didn’t Reagan spend vast quantities of money on his SDI “hoax”? Trolling a country that had enough nukes to basically vapourise everyone in the world?
The man was an idiot, and a dangerous asshole. Everyone spent the 80s not knowing if we’d all be turned to dust in 5 minutes. Don’t you remember? I’d consider him being a psychopath if he wasn’t completely cuckoo from old-timers. Nancy’s numerologist, for fuck’s sake!
The world we live in exists because of spaceflight technology. Why go to the Moon? Because it’s there. Duh!
“Didn’t Reagan spend vast quantities of money on his SDI “hoax”? Trolling a country that had enough nukes to basically vapourise everyone in the world?”
No. SDI was a technology designed to render Russia’s ICBM Arsenal useless, we convinced the Russians we could shoot their nukes out of the sky.
“The man was an idiot, and a dangerous asshole. Everyone spent the 80s not knowing if we’d all be turned to dust in 5 minutes. Don’t you remember?”
No, you are thinking of the fifties, not the 80’s – in the 80’s everyone was too busy working.
” I’d consider him being a psychopath if he wasn’t completely cuckoo from old-timers. Nancy’s numerologist, for fuck’s sake!”
Nancy didn’t attempt to write legislation, unlike First Lady Clinton (Hillary care) and First Lady Obama (let’s move). Nancy also solicited private donations for new whitehouse China, you know, the China First Lady Clinton and president Clinton felt entitled to when the left the whitehouse…
“The man was an idiot, and a dangerous asshole. Everyone spent the 80s not knowing if we’d all be turned to dust in 5 minutes. Don’t you remember?”
Reagan negotiated several nuke disarmament agreements with the Russians, effectively ended the Cold War and pushed the breakup of the USSR… Under Reagan’s watch the world became a much safer place, “Don’t you remember?”
LOL!
You are a right wing partisan! Gosh Ken… Wear it like a badge, you old codger.
You think the world got safer due to things like Iran Contra? Fake secret plans to free hostages? Massive cold war Sabre rattling.. You think USA and russian plutocrats were not playing a game, using each other to bolster their own positions?
Do you understand the emperor almost always steps out naked? It is up to brave and honest citizens to point and laugh, and here you are complimenting the lacy fringe!
NO. Reagan was a hardcore globalist.. The first of the populist neocons…
Anyway, you are so intellectually bankrupt Ken – you suggest the emergency room is ‘healthcare’, then condemn the ACA without admitting the ACA (obamacare) was proposed by Mitt Romney.. You think it is fair to let donations to one’s chosen organizations stand in for massive amounts of tax a rich man would pay…
You are so unbalanced in your dissonant cognitive soup, nothing you say has any meaning other than to harm and disrupt.
“Anyway, you are so intellectually bankrupt Ken – you suggest the emergency room is ‘healthcare’,”
It is. Many millions of Americans get health care in ERs year after year.
“then condemn the ACA without admitting the ACA (obamacare) was proposed by Mitt Romney…”
I didn’t condemn PPACA, I described it – having PPACA healthcare coverage (even if the premiums are fully subsidized) costs the patient more than the previous charity care, because charity covered 100% of the expense, no deductible, no copay.
Having PPACA coverage does not guarantee you can find a doctor that will see you – many doctors (not all, but a growing minority) are refusing to take PPACA patients because of the greatly reduced reimbursement level of those plans.
After passage of PPACA the number of ER visits *increased*, confounding supporters that *promised* their’d be fewer ER visits after implementation (PPACA policy holders aren’t accustomed to making appointments, they simply go to ER knowing insurance will cover the cost).
“You think it is fair to let donations to one’s chosen organizations stand in for massive amounts of tax a rich man would pay…”
In this discussion Romney paid a reported $5.6M in taxes, about 14% of his income, the same level of taxation as the $65K income earner with NO deductions pays. Believe it or not, when everyone pays the same RATE, that is the definition of fair. People that argue the rich should pay twice the rate they pay are looking to use the tax code for a form of income redistribution.
if you’d like to rid the tax code of all deductions and go towards a simple flat tax with a large deduction (say, the first $25-35K of income is tax free), I’ all for that – but until then, I have no problem with a someone paying $5.6M on $40M in income or a person paying $9,575 on $65K of income.
wow this article should not have been published. It has zero relevance to hackaday.
(and are you serious? The whole “-gate” thing CAME from the watergate scandal. there is no need to append another “-gate” on the end.)
Mitchell and Webb joke. Look it up yourself, I’m not your Google!
They’re talking about a different scandal than Watergate.
Okay, so here is MY crazy theory. Yeah, I know it’s crazy and based on, well, pretty much nothing solid. However,
I think that yes, we went to the moon. I think that *backup* footage was shot on a sound stage because, let’s face it, if you spent billions of dollars on sending someone further than anyone has ever gone and you can’t back your claim up, well, you better have a solid plan B. I also think that the missing information is because something was found that someone in power decided that the world wasn’t ready for (I find it curious as to why they, “go to kilo” so often). I *suspect* that the live broadcast was switched over to the backup partway through. Be this because of a technical error or because of said “something” on the moon … well, I’m already speculating wildly, so again, . I DO think it’s damn odd that photos from the Apollo missions appear to be pieced together as though it were a collage. I also think it’s damn odd that the Clementine mission glitched 12 separate times in a perfect row while taking photos of the moon. I think it’s damn odd that MANY astronauts openly believe in aliens and UFOs and seem to be extraordinarily careful about what they say in interviews. I think it’s damn odd that Bob Lazar apparently has none of the credentials he says he does, yet you can find him in an old telephone directory where he claims to have worked. I think it’s damn odd that Bob Lazar described the behavior of Ununpentium before we even discovered the element in a lab. I think it’s damn odd that live NASA footage from the ISS suddenly cut after one of the astronauts said something about how they were still watching an alien spaceship … I could go on, but frankly, I’m impressed you made it this far especially since I’m making no *real* attempt to organize my thoughts.
Looks like “giorgio tsoukalos.jpg” comments didn’t make it because I used angle brackets and the contents within got stripped.
Damn that is odd, just like every second number is too!
1+2=3, but 3-1=2! And Pi, what’s that about?
I suspect HAD published this to fish for ideas on how to fake a moon video for next years HAD prize. It’s obvious the moon landings are real, so this is for some other reason….
I felt a great disturbance in the Web today as if hundreds of hackers had cried out in disgust. After tracking the source of their anguish to this article my worst fears were confirmed. The Empire of Bean Counters had brought their Monetization Ray to bear on HAD. My heart sank when looking upon the shattered remains of another useful and interesting site destroyed by the Bean Counters’ relentless pursuit of click-throughs.
I wish I had the will to stay and fight to rid this site of fluff but, alas, I see the shock troops coming with daily horoscopes and kitten videos. Perhaps we’ll meet again, my brothers and sisters, on a site far from here where soldering irons and hex editors are still first class citizens.
Until then, may the solder wick be fluxed for you.
Moon landings are real.
Conspiracies are also real. People have no reason to beleive the US government on any topic – groups within US government such as CIA are on the record saying:
“our job will be finished when everything americans believe is false”… This is the CIA mind you, an agency meant to protect americans.
Lobbying is a example of a massive conspiracy – there is endless payoff $ going into politicis – and the origin of this $ and the corporate-written legistlation it supports is NEVER discussed..
There are more real conspiracies than false ones, and many people have been laughed at as ‘conspiracy theorist’ then been absolutely right in the end.
Watergate is different from something like a proposed moon landing hoax.. Watergate was a political affair – Nixon was taking actions against ‘other members of the elite’ – not hoodwinking the US public.
Someone else above mentioned some real conspiracies – but look at this world – the BP spill went unpunished – the economic meltdown went unpunished. These are in fact examples of conspiracies. Powerful unnamed forces worked to prevent justice from being done.
Things like “Occams Razor” are evoked to shut down conspiracy theorists – but those who do so do not understand occams razor, which has nothing to do with evaluating these sorts of things – it is just pseudo-intellectualism.
Several people have also suggested US government might be the primary promoter of the hoax theory – this might sound like insanity or a joke to many people – but it is actually entirely possible if not likely.
Read enough of the stories like Brian mentioned, learn about CointelPro and the actual scope of what they did, and obviously still do, but with much more sophistication.
“the BP spill went unpunished”
Sure, if by ‘unpunished’ they didn’t piece back together the exploded bodies of the individuals involved and throw their asses in jail… But I seem to recall a $20BN ‘recovery fund’ was demanded by congress before the true impact of the disaster was known.
Think of one of the many hundreds of better examples you can think of, and substitute it.
Thx.
Respectfully in must been a slow day. IMO the best way to handle conspiracies is nor to feed them by giving them broad attention.. That’s not saying don’t engage a believer on one on with the facts. In the event you are searching for content when no worthy hacks or brought to your attention, a series on trouble shooting should be worthy content. Trouble shooting saves time and money when employed.
This article is disgusting and disgraceful to the amazing engineers and scientists of NASA. Hackaday really has become clickbait. What a slap in the face to the hard working people that made man’s greatest achievement possible.
http://www.hasaan.com/2012/08/debunking-moon-conspiracy-theories.html
Did you actually read the article and failed to comprehend it or just glanced at the title and jumped to a grossly incorrect conclusion?
Over a hundred comments on this “NOT A HACK!!!” article vs. a dozen or so on “this is a good hack” articles. Why? Is it because people have short attention spans, knee-jerk reactions, and a lack of critical thinking–a fertile ground for conspiracy theories?
I suspect the reality is that I’m actually a disembodied brain in a jar (running a vast underground complex or just some kid’s science fair experiment–who knows) and you are all computer-generated in the real conspiracy to distract me from the truth. Unfortunately the A.I.’s seem to be getting a little more out-of-whack every year.
Interesting read, in particular it highlights something becoming more and more apparent to me every day. That despite the great advances in technology, we haven’t equaled the scale of the achievements made by our parent’s generation despite the significantly superior advances in manufacturing, machining, electronics and understanding of physics and material sciences. To put it bluntly, we’re squandering our technological inheritance on the basest of things – ourselves. Welcome to the selfie generation. Reading some of the responses confirms that there’s a simmering guilt lurking just beneath the surface of the conspiracy theorist’s dull, wet skullcaps.
I disagree in many ways. Our parents generation oversaw the massive destruction of public faith and removal of social contract that has resulted in things like the moon hoax ‘theory’ gaining so much traction. People can see quite clearly the moral and ethical end result of ‘our parents generation’. We are in a country ‘the most wealthy in the world’, and we dont have public healthcare. We are ridiculed by the ruling class who blithely brag they are destroying social security.
Im not sure how old you are, but ‘our parents generation’ is still very much in charge. They refuse to retire, their craven decision making processes ever more antiquated in the era of potential transparency we are now in. The total and complete absurdity that is our financial system, our science funding scheme, the things like the Patriot Act and now CISPA.
This is all the work ‘of our parents’.
Do you expect 20 year olds to suddenly be in charge? Look at what gen-x has now become.. The labor force toiling for often terrible pay because ‘our parents generation’ destroyed labor unions, along with many other aspects of the social contract ‘our parents’ generations grew up in.
My dad paid $7k total to go to the same school I paid $85K to go to 20 years later.. just 20 years.. It is even more now. Meanwhile mitt romney paid 11% on 40million and I paid 50% on 65K…. Our parents generation is SCREWING US HARD.
According to the CIA the USA is not even in the top 10, you guys are down at 19th for wealth/population.
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2004rank.html
We have gone through massive increase in per worker productivity at the same time we have lost our social contract and seen massive un-documented inflation.. A,. wait for it.. conspiracy succeeded in removing many items from the inflation metrics each time it was needed – but everyone who buys gas, food, clothes, pays rent knows the truth… At least if they have thought about it.
Also, make no mistake, USA is the wealthiest, most powerful country, currently. ‘Our’ military spends more than the rest of the world combined – and that is only the on-the-record spendng. Our stock market and currency rule the earth.
Deny the meaning of ‘richest country on earth’ if you want, but we have no social contract anymore. It might be globalism, it might be just overlapping effects of un checked late stage-capitalism driven greed – but there is a conspiracy to harm USA, even if it is many small conspiracies that go unchallenged because the would be regulators are busy enacting their own conspiracies.
I dont really get your comment to me – is that all you wanted to say? other countries have a different income per citizen ratio.
Look into some of those stats. Qatar has like 6-8x as many chattle slave foreign-workers than they do ‘citizens’, just for instance.
LOL, I guess the reality-check gave you a paper-cut huh?
Worker productivity is BS. Its not that human workers have become more efficient somehow, it is because the owners of machine shops and other manufacturing facilities have heavily invested in automation that makes it look like the workers are doing more work.
For example, I worked at a machine shop that made parts for the 777. One of the parts had about 24 hours of machine time on it to finish. They spent 1.3 million on a new 5 axis mill with a 108HP, 33000 RPM spindle on it. This machine brought the machine time down on that part to somewhere around 8 hours. By the books the “productivity” guys use the worker running the new machine is now three time more productive.
The same goes for other things that used to be semi manual like press brakes. Modern CNC laser cutters and punches blow the old machines they used even 20 years ago out of the water speed and production wise with incredibly fast rapids and stroke times.
That’s what “worker productivity” IS. It doesn’t mean people started churning the same shit out by hand, twice as fast. Increasing automation increases the productivity of the factory, divided by the number of human workers. A man with a chisel can smash rocks faster than someone using their forehead. Have him run a rock-crusher and he does even more.
Also, i put it in quotes for a reason…..
Dan… Qatar has 2 million foreign workers and 265k citizens… Also, what are you doing here, trolling me?
Why?
OK ignore the top whatever “medieval ass-hole” countries , you are still not anywhere near 1st, just get over it will you.
Also, do you realize all that proves is that USA, clearly a juggernaut gives it’s citizens shitty compensation for our workers. This is not a conspiracy – everyone knows this.
LOL no, the figure is total wealth divided by number of people, and that is the point, you are not as rich as you think you are.
I am the same on a personal wealth level because I have a home that is three times bigger than average, but we have 2.6 times the average number of children to fit into that home.
Why is total number of people relevant? The wealth is not shared among all the citizens..
Your simplistic thinking is laughable – also, I will conceede that other countries have wealthier citizens on average. In fact, that is something I am totally aware of. I put the initial phrase in quotes. Because you do not understand what that means, it means I said it with some sarcasm.
The sarcasm, a low form of wit, was due to my sense of irony tingling.
Sigh.. All these things I have said, and you want to conflate population/GDP and overall ‘wealth’. You silly little person!
“The wealth is not shared among all the citizens..” and that is the same situation across all nations therefore it is irrelevant because we are comparing all nations.
So who is being simplistic? You!
Look at who has the money, the places with lots of oil to sell to you and you burn a lot of oil. QED the average person in the USA is poorer than in 18 other nations because you keep giving them all of your money to get stuff that you then burn. LOL.
“Meanwhile mitt romney paid 11% on 40million and I paid 50% on 65K”
No, you didn’t.
You didn’t pay 50% of your $65K in salary in federal income taxes. [0]
I want to challenge your claim about Mitt Romney paying 11% on $40M, but I don’t have any first-time experience at that income level. I can guarantee you Mitt Romney likely donated many times your $65K/annual income to various charities, which drove down his tax obligation – just as your $100 donation to your alma mater also reduced your tax obligation.
[0] if EVERY dollar of your income was taxed (and it wasn’t), and you filed as an individual, you paid $12,100 in federal income taxes on your $65K income in 2014, as shown on page 68 of the IRS 1040A instructions – https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/i1040a.pdf
You guys are seriously nit picking meaningless aspects of my statements… Sheesh.. But here goes!
OK! IT WAS 14%. http://money.cnn.com/2012/09/21/pf/taxes/romney-tax-return/
If you think tax breaks due to donations make this fair, we disagree deeply.
For us relatively poor people, each regressive tax or fee is a major % of our income compared to mitt. I was being slightly disingenuous implying all 50% went to fed tax, but believe me, if we include this aspect, Mitt paid even a larger difference. My take home is less than 50% of my ‘salary’.
Why are you focusing on these details? They interest you? Did you notice the overall thesis of my statements? Why are you so pedantic? What do you hope to achieve with this?
My country fixed your sort of tax problem by raising the tax free threshold so that many people at the bottom end pay little or no tax and we still manage to put 30% of all tax revenue into medical and social support systems.
“My country fixed your sort of tax problem by raising the tax free threshold so that many people at the bottom end pay little or no tax”
In the US, nearly 50% of tax filers either pay NO income tax or receive a tax refund in excess of all taxes withheld during the tax year (in other words, nearly half of all filers profit from the tax code)
“and we still manage to put 30% of all tax revenue into medical and social support systems.”
As noted here [0] the US puts 27% of our federal spending ‘into medical and social support systems.’
[0] https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/i1040a.pdf (see the chart on page 83)
Apparently the US is keeping up with your mystery homeland.
OK so my homeland is 3% superior, that is still better!
;-)
“OK so my homeland is 3% superior, that is still better! ;-)”
Congratulations! ;^)
Want to buy some black coal or iron ore? Got a good deal on it at the moment, once in a decade chance if you ask me!
“My take home is less than 50% of my ‘salary’.”
No, no it wasn’t – ‘take home’ is your salary minus state and federal income taxes, along with various other mandated contributions and employer deductions for your healthcare plan – it does not include your property taxes, for example
Why am I pushing back on your claims? Because you distort the truth to portray yourself the victim. Mitt Romney paid, by your latest revision, 14% of $40M, or right around $5.6M in income taxes. You likely paid about 10% of your income in federal taxes, or about $6-7K. Then, after deducting your mortgage interest, maybe you claimed a dependent or two, you likely had a federal tax bill closer to 5% of your income.
I think Mitt Romney paying nearly 3x the tax RATE you paid is his fair share, and I suspect Mr. Romney would agree.
If you filed your 2014 taxes using the 1040ez form and had ZERO deductions you would have a $10,150 standard deduction, making your taxable income $54,850, meaning you would owe owe $9,575 in federal taxes, which works out to 14.7% of your $65K income.
You paid 14.7% of $65K and feel like you are a victim, Mitt Romney paid 14% of $40M and you feel he should pay 85% – Why?
Did the topic of this hack a day post attract staunch “libertarian” pro-capitalists?
F off, ken. I have no mortgage, no dependents. You are ridiculous. Mitt Romney should have been taxed 85% – like rich men were back when USA cared about it’s citizens.
No one paid 85%, the rich used elaborate tax shelters to avoid paying such onerous tax rates (John Lennon famously left England to escape their 95% tax rate… Ronald Reagan observed first-hand how high tax rates hurt union workers when he was making movies – top bill actors would only work part of the year, keeping their income under the threshold the abusively high tax rates kicked-in, causing fewer movies to be made. When fewer movies are made, fewer Union laborers (electricians, cameramen, etc) got work, so their income suffered. Why would the actors stop working? Why work when the Gov’t takes 95 cents of every dollar earned?).
Ah yeah, THAT’S why Ronald Reagan didn’t get more work.
If you have more, you can afford to pay more. While there are still people with very little, without adequate health care in a first-world country, then it’s fair. It’s ridiculous and insulting to see millionaires and billionaires crying about having to contribute some of their money-heaps to society.
But that said most of the fuckers pay very little anyway, as you say, through tax-fraud schemes. Collecting the money they actually owe would be a start. There’s plenty of huge loopholes. The fact the same government that makes the rules, is full of incredibly rich men and the friends of incredibly rich men, might have something to do with it.
Government are supposed to be in charge, to represent all of us. Not the rich and big companies.
“It’s ridiculous and insulting to see millionaires and billionaires crying about having to contribute some of their money-heaps to society.”
From the reports I’ve seen most ‘millionaires and billionaires’ that claim to support higher tax rates for them have one caveat in common – they all want the increased tax revenue to go towards paying down debt/reducing deficit spending, not increasing welfare rolls or increasing section 8 housing subsidies.
“we dont have public healthcare.”
Yes we do, and we had it long before Barack Obama ran for President.
Federal law required hospitals to care for any sick person that presented themselves to the hospital – we called this ‘charity care’ and it provided care for millions of people per year.
We also had Medicare, which provided free healthcare for countless millions that either were too poor or met certain age requirements.
We also had a program to care for millions of otherwise uninsured children.
With the implementation of PPACA (Obamacare) people that used to qualify for free charity care were pushed into either Medicare or ‘free’ subsidized ObamaCare policies (with their obscene deductibles/copays they were never previously responsible for).
The only way an American went without healthcare before PPACA was if they made too much to qualify for free healthcare and couldn’t figure out a way to get themselves to a hospital ER… Of course, they might get a bill, but they saw a doctor, and if they declared bankruptcy the debt was discharged (explaining the large number of ‘medical expense bankruptcies’)
People waiting to get sick enough that they would qualify for ER care is suboptimal.
“People waiting to get sick enough that they would qualify for ER care is suboptimal.”
‘Suboptimal’ is not the same as ‘non-existent’ – they could have gone to a Planned Parenthood ‘family health clinic’ I hear they offered all kinds of free medical health services…
I didn’t say that free health care was non-existent. I was just calling your solution of having people apply for expensive ER care suboptimal.
Fair enough, the original comment was that the US lacked public healthcare.
When I first saw Americans on TV, complaining about some chronic health problem with their back or shoulder, that they “can’t afford” to get fixed, I was shocked. In the UK, if there’s something wrong with you, we fix it.
It’s also much cheaper overall, because we don’t have greedy insurance companies chasing profits. Healthcare isn’t an intrinsically profitable thing, it’s a net loss to all of society. It’s fairer, and MUCH cheaper, to just let the government pay for the lot.
Look at the pathos of a US citizen like Ken… No matter what the topic, he has some excuse for it – some reason it is wrong to condemn..
But then he shows his true colors: he equates a system like canada, UK, heck, all of the west except USA has – to showing up at the emergency room.
Ken is intellectually dishonest and is only disrupting thought, not adding to it.
“he equates a system like canada, UK, heck, all of the west except USA has – to showing up at the emergency room.”
No, it’s an option former folks without other options – we have laws requiring that services be provided absent concerns about being paid.
The ‘improvement’ offered by government is to pay insurance companies with federal money to provide the poor with ‘free’ (100% subsidized premiums) healthcare coverage with $5,000 deductibles.
Charity care has been reduced, funding stolen by gov’t to help finance PPACA.
Fact – ER visits are up under Obamacare.
Fact – many previously uninsured Americans are delaying medical procedures because they can’t afford the multi-thousand dollar deductibles on their ‘free’ coverage.
Fact – healthcare coverage policies are getting more expensive, not less – the $2,500 the President promised average American families has morphed into increases instead.
“It’s fairer, and MUCH cheaper, to just let the government pay for the lot.”
In the UK their system is not without it’s problems. For many patients, healthcare delayed is (effectively) healthcare denied:
http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/nov/13/nhs-scan-result-delays-cancer-patients-x-ray
And what happens when NHS coffers run low? Rationing:
http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/apr/21/nhs-to-extend-rationing-of-healthcare-in-bid-to-balance-books
“That despite the great advances in technology, we haven’t equaled the scale of the achievements made by our parent’s generation despite the significantly superior advances in manufacturing, machining, electronics and understanding of physics and material sciences. To put it bluntly, we’re squandering our technological inheritance on the basest of things – ourselves.”
And, just coincidently, right about the time our public education system started failing us, we welcomed a brand new Department of Education. As pointed out in David Guggenheim’s OTHER movie, “Waiting for Superman,” with the creation of the Dept. of Education and the countless hundreds of billions we collectively have poured down that gaping maw of bureaucracy the quality of our students has remained stagnant (as measured by standardized tests)… And before you decry teachers ‘teaching to the test’ I posit they are not, because if they were, wouldn’t we, after several decades of ‘teaching to the tests’ see SOME measure of improvement in our scores?
My response explains why test scores keep dropping: loss of social contract.
“My response explains why test scores keep dropping: loss of social contract.”
Sorry, are you saying ‘Johnny can’t read at grade-level because he doesn’t connect with his fellow man’?
Bullshit.
We could always feed him this for a conspiracy theory starter, http://www.livescience.com/49087-phthalates-exposure-lower-iq-kids.html
His parents both work, constant endless worry about retirement, lack of healthcare, etc. have driven his family apart – combined with consumption-encouraging lifestyle choices being promoted on tv (multiple marriages, etc).
His tired and broke parents cannot spend time with him, the public school system is now a daycare for workers, not a place for children to learn.
“A broken clock is right twice a day, a broken calendar is right every twenty-eight years or so…”. How is this figure achieved? It sounded pretty high to me so I picked a few dates at random and checked using timeanddate.com and got an average of more like 8 years. For example Sunday 9 May will occur in 2021, 2027, 2032, 2038, 2049. I tried about 20 dates and got pretty consistent results. Days on 29 February did come in at 28 years. (Monday 2016, 2044) (Wednesday 2012, 2040).
Now I get it! I assumed he meant a daily calendar, he meant that the entire year calendar is repeated every 28 years.
I enjoyed the read. I didn’t go into it thinking they were going to hack anything so I guess that’s where some of the other readers pain comes from. Should the author cater to the idiots and create a whole other section dedicated to the occasional reading of this sort…I sure hope not. This article, while entertaining, has been great troll bait. The ratio of amount read to amount typed by commenting viewers would be an interesting stat for this article.
“Here’s a list of conspiracies we learned about, therefore conspiracies we don’t learn about don’t exist”
Fine logic there, real fine.
Especially since half the ones we do know about we only learned about decades later and only because they freaking voluntarily told us about it.
“proof confirmation bias exists”
Don’t forget about cognitive dissonance!
The real conspiracy is why we haven’t been back to the moon in nearly 50 f**king years!
Because it’s hard to get there, and there’s nothing to do.
I read a while ago that NASA has several tons of moon rocks that nobody ever looked at yet…
Conspiracies are interesting.
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-dea-irs-idUSBRE9761AZ20130808
http://www.wired.com/2015/03/feds-admit-stingrays-can-disrupt-cell-service-bystanders/
http://www.theyrule.net/
That last site starts with a page wide shockwave thing, and then only works with javascipt enabled or you get a blank screen.
That sure sounds attractive to people worried about conspiracies I’m sure.
Incidentally, you probably were hacked if you enabled both, welcome to the collective.
You people are so dumbed down with city water and flu shots it isn’t funny. I suppose you all believe the government, FD and CDC when they say get in line the water and the shots are good for you….
Forget the government. I get my information from random strangers on the internet.
There’s “City folk just don’t get it!” and then there’s “City folk must get that way because they’re specifically conditioned by the government for it. It can’t be that there might be people who simply dislike rural environments or anything.”
Got my immunisations, drink tap water, still really smart! Not a fan of my country’s government either. Needs more fluoride!
Thank you for bringing this cancerous discussion to hackaday, this is why people groan when their hacks are featured on this website. This sort of thing is the reason why one of the first indications that something of yours has been featured here is a huge influx of trolls.
Where’s the hack?
Why doesn’t the New York Times tell me what time it is in New York?
They don’t even run a NTP server. What a bunch of soandsos
Here’s the plot for a Capricorn One remake: people all over the world create a Kickstart to fund a mission with the sole purpose of bringing the world’s most famous denier on the moon, so he will stop telling bullshit. Unfortunately the rocket explodes before arriving there generating a recursive conspiracy.
Does make one wonder, why you have such intense hostility that you wish to murder a person for saying something….
Why are we not on the moon right now? Is it not time to have a moon base? I think space exploration for humans us standing still for a long time now. The ISS is just a modern version of the MIR.
Oh come on HaD.
Put a stop to the clickbait fluff engorgement program.
What with the incessant self-referral articles and stuff like this (albeit well written, researched and presented) your lifeblood – us hackers – are having to spend longer and longer every day to find what we used to come here for.
One hack per calendar day. You knew the deal when you came here.
Lol, yeah – point taken. But when it starts to take longer than one calendar day to find said hack I’ll be raising the issue again :-)
I have the wildest conspiracy theory of them all: there’s no such thing as Watergate-“GATE” you fools…!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vB9JgxhXW5w
Looks like I AM somebody’s Google.
That’s hilarious! And +1 to Max.
Not only that … there are TWO Gates-gates:
The first Gates-gate was right after Obama became president, and he started opining on specific happenings in the country that he was not involved with, which upset people. This is sometimes known as “Henry Gates-gate”: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/07/26/obamas_henry_gates-gate_97623.html
(It is a story that lots of lefties like to pretend never happened, an no one ever talked about it after then)
Then, later, Obama supposedly cornered SecDef Robert Gates into resigning: http://www.juancole.com/2014/01/gatesgate-generals-afghanistan.html
Greenaum, that video was staged and is a conspiracy.
You think they shot it ON PURPOSE!?
The author has made a glorious mistake with a statement I hear all the time:
“The Apollo moon landing conspiracy contends that 400,000 government workers and contractors would need to keep quiet, and no inquisitive journalists would be out in the trenches, digging for the truth.”
This simply isn’t correct. Moon landings are inconsistent with the very basics of human discovery. Columbus, Wright Brothers, discoveries were immediately adapted and improved upon by others. Yet decades go by with no lunar bases? I just don’t think so.
Simple explanation: lunar bases are extremely expensive, and pretty much useless.
Lunar exploration is useless once you’ve pissed off the Soviets.