Plausible Hoax Theories

[ka9q]

And a president who was addicted to public adulation, who, despite being well aware of the risks, rode open motorcades past countless buildings in densely populated cities all around the world, and who one day simply rode past one building too many.

But try to explain that to a conspiracist.

[bknight]

And a president who was addicted to public adulation, who, despite being well aware of the risks, rode open motorcades past countless buildings in densely populated cities all around the world, and who one day simply rode past one building too many.

But try to explain that to a conspiracist.

Excellent points.

[Luke Pemberton]

My question to this forum is:  Are there any hoax theories that any of you more educated people have seen that made you stop and think or were difficult for you to disprove?

No, not a single aspect of the hoax theory has convinced me. There are several reasons.

Firstly, the initial ideas of Kaysing et al involved ideas such as no stars, waving flags, parallel shadows and blast craters. These arguments were so easily debunked the hoax fell for me at the first hurdle. The basic physics of its original advocates was so appalling that it was easily dismissed as hogwash. The idea simply lost all credibility the moment it was aired because of the blatant stupidity on show.

Further, I don't think a hoax on such a scale could be kept secret for so long. There is not a single scientist of notable repute to cry foul, especially those that have investigated the geological samples.

People like Jarrah White and David Percy have bolted on so many parts to the original theory it is riddled with contradictions. For example, Jarrah White has produced two videos, in one he claims wet sand must have been used to hoax the famous Aldrin type boot prints, in another he claims that the dust movement was faked using dry sand. Of course, in the latter case he uses motions that are entirely inconsistent with an astronaut donned in a space suit in a low-g environment. Another example of their cumbersome fantasia was highlighted when Phil Webb analysed Jarrah's Exhibit D video, he found no fewer than 32 contradicting statements.

The retro-reflectors are definitive proof for me, quite simply because they provide data about the moon's orbit that is consistent with Einstein's general theory. You can't easily make those numbers up and fool the scientific community. Given the nature of Einstein's field equations, you would be going some to fiddle the parameters. That only leaves real data from real retro-reflectors placed by astronauts on missions that really landed on the moon.

Finally, the CTs have made error after error with branches of maths, physics, chemistry, geology and engineering. Each time they skulk away in a familiar fashion, repackage their ideas; only to introduce more inconsistencies as they try to save face. More often than not they ignore strong counter arguments and simply use ad hominen tactics to detract attention from their initial stupidity. These are not the actions of honest and credible people.

[smartcooky]

'''

However, as for the better known ongoing Conspiracy Theories; moon landing Hoax, JFK & RFK assassinations, Boston Bombing, 9/11 etc, all BS of the worst kind... and that is from someone who at one time believed there was a second gunman!!

I would never guessed that of you.  I have never been a fan of the CT of JFK's assignation, just a nobody that wanted to be somebody, with a rifle as his chosen method.

It was a different time and I was a lot younger and less wise. Also, it was the pre-internet age, information was really difficult to get and there weren't many books on the JFK assasination. Criminal forensics was also less well understood.

JFK was the only CT I ever believed, and unlike other CTists, as more information became available, much of it on the internet, my belief weakened rather than strengthened. I began to realise that this was simply a lone gunman and there was no conspiracy to kill JFK.

[Allan F]

'''

However, as for the better known ongoing Conspiracy Theories; moon landing Hoax, JFK & RFK assassinations, Boston Bombing, 9/11 etc, all BS of the worst kind... and that is from someone who at one time believed there was a second gunman!!

I would never guessed that of you.  I have never been a fan of the CT of JFK's assignation, just a nobody that wanted to be somebody, with a rifle as his chosen method.

It was a different time and I was a lot younger and less wise. Also, it was the pre-internet age, information was really difficult to get and there weren't many books on the JFK assasination. Criminal forensics was also less well understood.

JFK was the only CT I ever believed, and unlike other CTists, as more information became available, much of it on the internet, my belief weakened rather than strengthened. I began to realise that this was simply a lone gunman and there was no conspiracy to kill JFK.

If you ever need anything on the plausibility of the rifle shot, I'll ble glad to help. Shot a Sauer STR200 6.5x55 competitively for around 10 years. And at that distance, with that rifle, Oswald had an easy shot.

[nomuse]

For stuff like that, there's often a sort of inverse of the Texas Sharpshooter effect. The conspiracy believer looks at the odds of the bullet/airplane/whatever doing what it actually did and claims that is too unlikely for anyone to have seriously contemplated the attack in the first place. What they forget is the large number of perhaps equally unlikely but different paths the bullet/airplane/whatever could have taken that would also have been quite sufficient for the attacker's purposes.

Oswald didn't set out to make THAT shot. He set out to make A shot.

[nomuse]

More apropos, more general; it sort of saddens me that it is so impossible to make a plausible Apollo conspiracy theory even if you have the technical background to properly understand the evidence. If I wanted to write a thriller or science fiction yarn I'd either have to give up on the first page, or be forced to make it a story about the "Argos Project" with a huge number of differences (that make a fictional hoax possible).

(I'm actually wrestling with something similar right now. Got somehow cajoled into writing a Stargate fanfic, and the central Ancient Astronauts conceit of the show is just about impossible to reconcile with anything in real history or archaeology. Which means in the end you can't write more than a few words before you are forced to either abandon canon or lie about history. And neither is a palatable choice.)

[ka9q]

That only leaves real data from real retro-reflectors placed by astronauts on missions that really landed on the moon.

We've got to be careful with the retroreflector argument since most of the smarter CTs (I know that's not saying much) know that the USSR landed two rovers with retroreflectors, thus "proving" that the Apollo reflectors could have been placed robotically too.

I sometimes challenge them to explain why, if it was possible to land robots in the moon in the 1960s and 70s, it was nonetheless impossible to land humans. If they answer at all, it's usually to mumble about radiation.

To sharpen the point I say that one of the most important roles of the Apollo LM commander was to pick a safe landing spot -- and robotic vision is a famously difficult problem that only now is finally making some serious progress. In other words, in some ways it was actually easier to land humans on the moon than robots -- as underscored by the fact that all six attempted Apollo landings succeeded while two of the seven Surveyor missions crashed along with who knows how many Soviet missions. The robotic mission controllers basically had to land blind and hope they didn't hit a boulder or steep crater wall.

Of course it wasn't cheaper to land humans on the moon, but that was just a matter of money -- which the US had to burn on space in those days. They just had to scale everything up, something Americans have always been famous for: a huge rocket and a (relatively) huge lander with the necessary life support equipment and supplies as well as a fully fueled ascent stage and a waiting CSM for the return to earth. The Saturn V was the biggest, the most crucial and probably the most expensive part of the whole Apollo program, and few can doubt its reality -- although surprisingly there are some who do.

Edit to add: I'm actually not sure about how the Apollo program costs broke down. Does anybody have any good estimates of how much went to the three major Apollo flight components: the Saturn V, the CSM and the LM? Each would have two parts: the initial development ("NRE" or non-recurring engineering in industry-speak, or fixed costs in economics-speak) and the second being production and testing of the flight units (variable costs). Of course there would be major additional sums for the construction of ground infrastructure and then for mission operations, again representing fixed and variable costs.

[bknight]

That only leaves real data from real retro-reflectors placed by astronauts on missions that really landed on the moon.

We've got to be careful with the retroreflector argument since most of the smarter CTs (I know that's not saying much) know that the USSR landed two rovers with retroreflectors, thus "proving" that the Apollo reflectors could have been placed robotically too.

I sometimes challenge them to explain why, if it was possible to land robots in the moon in the 1960s and 70s, it was nonetheless impossible to land humans. If they answer at all, it's usually to mumble about radiation.

To sharpen the point I say that one of the most important roles of the Apollo LM commander was to pick a safe landing spot -- and robotic vision is a famously difficult problem that only now is finally making some serious progress. In other words, in some ways it was actually easier to land humans on the moon than robots -- as underscored by the fact that all six attempted Apollo landings succeeded while two of the seven Surveyor missions crashed along with who knows how many Soviet missions. The robotic mission controllers basically had to land blind and hope they didn't hit a boulder or steep crater wall.

Of course it wasn't cheaper to land humans on the moon, but that was just a matter of money -- which the US had to burn on space in those days. They just had to scale everything up, something Americans have always been famous for: a huge rocket and a (relatively) huge lander with the necessary life support equipment and supplies as well as a fully fueled ascent stage and a waiting CSM for the return to earth. The Saturn V was the biggest, the most crucial and probably the most expensive part of the whole Apollo program, and few can doubt its reality -- although surprisingly there are some who do.

Another point for the HB's, lasers were bounced off the moon before anything was sent there.  This is true, but with the  retro-reflectors the number of counts received increases when pointed to where they were put by the Apollo crews.
Another HB point about the Saturn V was the "lack of power" that it had to do the work.  Of course this fails also if yu have the knowledge, such as Bob B. has.

[ka9q]

For stuff like that, there's often a sort of inverse of the Texas Sharpshooter effect.

Yes, exactly, Texas sharpshooter. Hmm, Texas.

The conspiracy believer looks at the odds of the bullet/airplane/whatever doing what it actually did and claims that is too unlikely for anyone to have seriously contemplated the attack in the first place. What they forget is the large number of perhaps equally unlikely but different paths the bullet/airplane/whatever could have taken that would also have been quite sufficient for the attacker's purposes.

I've argued this point myself, usually with a lottery analogy. The chances of any one individual winning the Powerball (a huge multi-state US lottery) are infinitesimal, but there are so many players that eventually somebody will win a huge jackpot. It's a fallacy to harp, after the fact, on how unlikely it was for that specific person to win.

Oswald didn't set out to make THAT shot. He set out to make A shot.

Precisely. And he needed three shots, his first missing entirely.

I really think people are mostly ignorant of the scale of the risk that JFK repeatedly accepted in satisfying his craving for adulation. And this isn't 20-20 hindsight; JFK himself famously made a fatalistic comment about it the morning of his assassination. Maybe, just maybe, if he'd known the depth and duration of the turmoil his assassination would cause, he might have reconsidered. In some ways the country never recovered. Or maybe I'm projecting the fact that the JFK assassination was the earliest event I can remember that happened outside my own family. (I was in second grade at the time. I was really annoyed that all the Saturday morning cartoons were preempted.)

Anyway, everybody knows that JFK rode in a motorcade through downtown Dallas around noon on November 22, 1963. A few might know that he also rode through downtown Fort Worth earlier the same day. But I wonder how many people know just how many previous motorcades in how many cities JFK rode in during (and even before) his presidency, and how it seems (and not just to me) obvious in hindsight that what happened in Dallas was bound to happen somewhere eventually -- especially in a country (and state) already awash with guns. There's a reason no president since has ridden in an open motorcade except occasionally through certain specific parts of Washington DC where the Secret Service is able to secure every building along the route.

[ka9q]

Another point for the HB's, lasers were bounced off the moon before anything was sent there.  This is true, but with the  retro-reflectors the number of counts received increases when pointed to where they were put by the Apollo crews.

You must be reading Hunchbacked's latest screeds. Yes, he's active again.

The claim that retroreflectors aren't necessarily there because pre-Apollo tests used the natural lunar surface is a classic example of CT innumeracy. Yes, if you use enough energy -- a long, powerful pulse -- you can get a return from the bare lunar surface. But the return pulse is characteristically stretched in time because, due to diffraction, the telescope can't help but illuminate several square km of surface, and the roughness of that surface (plus simple geometry) results in a wide range of round trip delays all jumbled together. It's like yelling into the Grand Canyon; sure, if you have a big enough amplifier/speaker you can hear your echo. But that won't get rid of the reverberation.

An artificial retroreflector is small, so it intercepts only a small fraction of the kilometers-wide beam as it hits the lunar surface. But this is good because that significantly limits the variation in round trip times. (Although the reflectors were aligned to the average position of the earth in the sky at that location, libration is enough to cause the reflectors to be seen a little obliquely for much of the month, resulting in one of the larger remaining error sources in the data.)

So the mere fact that the return pulses from the Apollo (and Lunokhod) reflectors are so sharp in time and far brighter than anything that could possibly be expected of the natural lunar surface is proof of a small, extremely reflective and therefore artificial reflectors on the moon.

Hunchbacked's latest rationalization is as amusing as it is silly. He now thinks NASA scanned the entire lunar surface with a laser, looking for natural spots that behaved exactly as the real reflectors are purported to do, and when they found them they scheduled their "bogus" Apollo missions to "deploy" retroreflectors at those sites.

[ka9q]

Another HB point about the Saturn V was the "lack of power" that it had to do the work.  Of course this fails also if yu have the knowledge, such as Bob B. has.

Another classic favorite. I think we've discussed this here before, but to summarize I usually challenge the claimant to find a combination of sub-nominal thrust and less-than-nominal gross liftoff weight that simultaneously satisfies the following properties of the Saturn V as verified by non-NASA parties (news media and especially crowds of the general public):

1. A liftoff acceleration (as verified by tower clear time) of about 1.4 g.

2. Mach-1 at about T+66 seconds, as verified by shock clouds forming momentarily around the launcher.

3. Engine burn times of 135 sec (center engine) and 162 sec (outer engines).

4. Propellant masses constrained by observed dimensions of S-IC stage and known densities of RP-1 and LOX.

I could go further and require adherence to the observed look angles (azimuth and elevation) vs time, but I'll assume that most TV camera operators and members of the public didn't bring protractors or surveying equipment.

[raven]

What I love is when the same people that say NASA sent the reflectors via unmanned landers or rovers, ignoring the highly pertinent question of who built these alleged unmanned vehicles and how they were landed on the Moon in secret, then somehow claim that NASA did not have computers powerful enough to send Apollo to the moon. 
That's either some Orwell grade doublethink, or they're just copy and pasting claims without really putting any kind of thought into them.
Mind you, the two are not mutually exclusive.

[gillianren]

More apropos, more general; it sort of saddens me that it is so impossible to make a plausible Apollo conspiracy theory even if you have the technical background to properly understand the evidence. If I wanted to write a thriller or science fiction yarn I'd either have to give up on the first page, or be forced to make it a story about the "Argos Project" with a huge number of differences (that make a fictional hoax possible).

I amuse myself sometimes by attempting to make conspiracy theories fit the known historical record, and I just can't with Apollo; it's one of the few that I haven't found a way around.  Kennedy and 9/11 are easy with a few minor changes and additions.  Apollo and the Holocaust, conversely are great rocks of evidence that will not be worn down no matter how much sand you blow at them.  The Birther thing?  Shaped wrong for the evidence to stick, because it doesn't fit into history.

[smartcooky]

'''

However, as for the better known ongoing Conspiracy Theories; moon landing Hoax, JFK & RFK assassinations, Boston Bombing, 9/11 etc, all BS of the worst kind... and that is from someone who at one time believed there was a second gunman!!

I would never guessed that of you.  I have never been a fan of the CT of JFK's assignation, just a nobody that wanted to be somebody, with a rifle as his chosen method.

It was a different time and I was a lot younger and less wise. Also, it was the pre-internet age, information was really difficult to get and there weren't many books on the JFK assasination. Criminal forensics was also less well understood.

JFK was the only CT I ever believed, and unlike other CTists, as more information became available, much of it on the internet, my belief weakened rather than strengthened. I began to realise that this was simply a lone gunman and there was no conspiracy to kill JFK.

If you ever need anything on the plausibility of the rifle shot, I'll ble glad to help. Shot a Sauer STR200 6.5x55 competitively for around 10 years. And at that distance, with that rifle, Oswald had an easy shot.

If I ever had any doubts about my switch from believer to non-believer, the clincher was the debunking of the "magic bullet theory". I think we all know the story about that, but here is a brief recap for those who don't.

It was necessary to prove that a single bullet was responsible for two wounds as it passed through JFK's body, and a further five wounds as it passed through Governor Connolly's right shoulder and right wrist and embedded in his left knee. Without the single bullet proof, a fourth shot would have to be accepted as fact and that automatically means a second gunman, since LHO could not possibly have fired two shots close enough together to account for all seven wounds. So Arlen Specter came up with a cockamamie piece of bullshit pseudo-ballistics (endorsed by the Warren Commission) to explain how a single bullet followed an unlikely sequence of twists, turns and deflections to make all the wounds

The obvious unlikeliness of this scenario raised a lot of suspicions. It looked like a made up story to cover the existence of  a second shooter. Well, it was made up alright, but it was because they didn't understand what really happened. Spector (and presumably everyone else on the Warren Commission ) failed to notice two really important  aspects of how Governor Connelly was positioned in the Presidential limo...

1. He was not sitting directly in front of JFK, he was seated slightly inboard and lower.

2. At the time of the shot, he had turned partially around (presumably as a reaction to the first shot ringing out)

When you take those things into account, the single bullet does not need to be magic any more... its a straight line through JFK, then through Connelly's right shoulder and right wrist and into his left knee...