Jack White passed...

[raven]

The best you could probably hope for is to find someone willing to take on a position, a devil's advocate, for purposes of discussion.

[gillianren]

Honestly, the best you can hope for is someone who has just come across the hoax idea and is able to be talked out of it.  Someone who heard just enough to be uncertain and is still intelligent and reasonable.  We don't get those often, but I'd rather have one than someone arguing Devil's advocate.

[Lunchpacked]

Honestly, the best you can hope for is someone who has just come across the hoax idea and is able to be talked out of it.  Someone who heard just enough to be uncertain and is still intelligent and reasonable.  We don't get those often, but I'd rather have one than someone arguing Devil's advocate.

I am one of those. i have a friend who was into all kinds of conspiracy theories. although i had heard of hoaxing before when i was younger (the coke bottle thing i think) but didn't pay attention to it. then my friend introduced me to the hoax via the bart sibrel funny thing movie. i immediately was skeptical, because of both the nazi intro and i knew it was a conspiracy video. however, at the time i had little knowledge of apollo, other than that it happened and the the odd tv shows and a13 movie, so many of the claims presented did make me unsure of the landings.. he especially pointed out the "earth transparency" clip.
for a while i didnt do much about it, but a couple of years ago he brought it up again. i then procded to research these claims, and managed to find the original video on a nasa site. where it clearly shows it disappears behind the window..

from that day on i have continued researching the apollo missions, absorbing all the knowledge i can. i can truly say that the hoax actually opened my eyes to the incredible feat of landing on the moon.

my friend now is at the point where he believes that we went to the moon, but that some pictures may have been removed or doctored/faked to remove something nasa did not want anybody to see. (like removing a ufo in the sky from a panorama, or something.)

the funniest thing is that he actually has Buzz Aldrin's left (i think) training glove, i remember playing with it when we were younger, and some of the black rubber inside had deteriorated and crystalized, so at the time we thught it was moon dust, all black and shiny. ahh. magical times

and then these slimeballs like david percy (eww) and barf sibrel (ugh) show up with their pompous claims and present bad photo copies and fake credentials and intentions.
all to sell their crap. and some idiots actually buy into it without any afterthought or research, just gawking at the screen with wide eyes going "wow. it must be fake"

thank god that there are only a few active moon hoaxers on youtube.. jarrah, hunchbacked and a couple more. though hunchbacked is the one that seems the most active at churning out new ideas about the hoax at the moment, so it is easier to counter every one of their biased badly researched claims

[gillianren]

I really do think hoax belief is dying, the way hardly anyone seems to blame FDR for Pearl Harbor anymore.

[Kiwi]

Hehe. What the "brilliant" Jack White who also claimed to be a "photo expert" couldn't figure out (see attachment).

...it looks to me more like one of the 'cue cards' the crew stuck up here and there. I think there's an image around somewhere of Armstrong inside the LM with one of those visible above/behind him.

The photos concerned here are AS11-40-5862 and AS11-37-5528 (links below).

AS11-40-5862 is the first photo of Buzz exiting the LM.  To the right of the large white circle, the top of Neil's window is visible.  It needs to be lightened considerably to see White's "flag." In Irfan View I get a good result by zooming in on the window then increasing brightness by 100 and contrast by 90.

It's seems that things like timing, angle of reflection, and ALSJ photo captions didn't concern Jack White.  The flag hadn't yet been erected, and even if it had, it wouldn't have been reflected by Neil's window from that particular camera position, if at all.

The culprit for the "flag" is identified in the ALSJ captions (emphasis added):

AS11-40-5862 http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/alsj/a11/AS11-40-5862.jpg
Hi res:
http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/alsj/a11/AS11-40-5862HR.jpg

ALSJ caption:
109:39:57 First photo of Buzz coming out through the hatch. The inward-opening hatch is on his left. Buzz is kneeling, probably with his hands on the midstep. We can see his heels, the lower portion of his PLSS and his left arm. Elsewhere in the image, both sets of thrusters are visible, along with Neil's window with the LPD grid etched on it, the straps of the Lunar Equipment Conveyor (LEC) coming out thru the hatch on the left, the upper portion of the ladder, the porch, and the plume deflector on the downward thruster on Buzz's side. The US flag that Neil and Buzz will deploy later is stowed in a long, thin canister attached to the underside of the lefthand rail of the ladder. Journal Contributor Markus Mehring notes that, thru the CDR's window, we can see "the crash bar, and a checklist/cue card that's been stuck under the overhead window with grey tape! -The same card can be seen right behind Neil in the post-EVA portrait, AS11-37-5528".


AS11-37-5528 http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/alsj/a11/AS11-37-5528.jpg
Hi res:
http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/alsj/a11/AS11-37-5528HR.jpg

ALSJ caption:
Buzz took this picture of Neil in the cabin after the completion of the EVA. Neil has his helmet off but has not yet doffed his "Snoopy" cap. The circuit breaker panels are illuminated, and a small floodlight is on at the lower right. A circuit breaker chart has been fixed up on the wall with gray tape, below the rendezvous window in the cabin roof. Scans by Kipp Teague.

[Lunchpacked]

http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/alsj/a11/AS11-37-5528HR.jpg

Now thats the face of a guy who has just had the most amazing experience walking around on the moon!

[Kiwi]

Now that's the face of a guy who has just had the most amazing experience walking around on the moon for the first time in the history of the entire human race!  And is very relieved that there are now samples of the moon safely stowed in the LM, and that neither, he, Buzz, nor the LM crashed though the top of a lava tube the depth of Hadley Rille.

There, fixed that for you!

I remember from the time before Apollo 11, lava tubes were still one of the great unknowns and it was thought that rilles might have been collapsed lava tubes.  The surveyor craft had done a great job of sending information about the lunar surface back to earth, but being so much lighter than the LM and having widely-spaced landing pads, there was far less of a chance that they would crash through into a tube.

The only places I've seen this concern mentioned post-Apollo are in Mike Collins's book, Carrying the Fire.

On pages 339-341 is his list of 11 major hurdles during a lunar-landing trip.  One of them is EVA:

7. EVA  Walking on the moon might be physically taxing and overload the oxygen or cooling systems. There might be potholes, or even underground lava tubes which could cause the surface to collapse.  Even more basic, any EVA puts man just one thin, glued-together, rubber membrane away from near-instant death.

And on page 410, after Houston tells Mike the crew of Tranquility Base is back inside:

Well, that's a big one behind us: no more worrying about crashing through into hidden lava tubes, or becoming exhausted, or the front door sticking open, or the little old ladies using weak glue, or any of that! Whew!

[Lunchpacked]

Now that's the face of a guy who has just had the most amazing experience walking around on the moon for the first time in the history of the entire human race!  And is very relieved that there are now samples of the moon safely stowed in the LM, and that neither, he, Buzz, nor the LM crashed though the top of a lava tube the depth of Hadley Rille.

There, fixed that for you!

true, but i think i would also make that face, even if the moon had been turned in to a theme park, and is a regular travel spot. and it was 100% safe

but interesting about the lava tubes.. it's like landing on snow, you don't know how thick it is, what is under it or if you will just plow straight through it. must have been nerve-wrecking to say the least

[ka9q]

Journal Contributor Markus Mehring notes that, thru the CDR's window, we can see "the crash bar, and a checklist/cue card that's been stuck under the overhead window with grey tape! -The same card can be seen right behind Neil in the post-EVA portrait, AS11-37-5528".

I remember participating in a discussion about that, but I can't remember who or where. I disagree with this analysis; I think the "flag" is more likely to be the Mylar shade hanging down from the rendezvous window above the Commander's station. The checklist taped to the left wall behind Armstrong in the post-EVA picture doesn't seem to be in quite the right position. The window shade is shown curled up in some pre-landing pictures when the LM was in zero-G, but on the moon it would probably have hung down loosely in 1/6-G.

[DataCable]

true, but i think i would also make that face, even if the moon had been turned in to a theme park

Sponsored by the Monsanto corporation.  "We're whalers on the moon..."

[Kiwi]

...I think the "flag" is more likely to be the Mylar shade hanging down from the rendezvous window above the Commander's station. The checklist taped to the left wall behind Armstrong in the post-EVA picture doesn't seem to be in quite the right position.

I wouldn't be surprised if that was right.  Had my own little doubt about the checklist, but know very little about the geometry of the LM in that area and thought the ALSJ guys would have known their stuff.  The perspective of the edges of the "flag" seems about right to me for the checklist, but I doubted the position and thought that perhaps the writing and the tape should show a little.  However, unlike some HBs, I don't butt in and rave about something I know little about.

If you can show the ALSJ guys the evidence, please do.  They want it to be accurate, and can't know everything.  Through Eric Jones gratefully thanking me for notifying him about a few minor typos, we've had some great chats. I sent him some stuff about Captain James Cook and he sold me the early CD-ROM copy of the ALSJ for peanuts.  I've since bought the DVD version, but the CD version, plus my own experience numbering negatives with indian ink in the 1970s, was the only one that solved one HB query about "studio lights" due to its early scans of Apollo lunar photos.

I sent Eric the names of the Playmates in the Apollo 12 lunar checklists,
http://apollohoax.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=apollo&action=display&thread=1345&page=1
but he was well behind doing updates at the time.  Anyway, it turned out that he beat me by two years when first reading Playboy in the 1960s.

I don't recall ever seeing those circuit-breakers behind Armstrong in the photo, or the shade you speak of. Fred Haise took some good film or video images near the CDR's  area of the Apollo 13 LM, so I must look at the little of what I have again.

Even the Tom Hanks movie might help, although I cringe over the wrong moon phase for Apollo 11 (same as in The Dish), the Saturn V's ignition at zero in the countdown (repeated in From the Earth to the Moon), the mention of seeing Tsiolkovsky followed almost instantly by Fra Mauro, and I think they also showed the CSM and LM going in the wrong direction close to Taurus-Littrow. Yuck! It would be nice to see a movie about Apollo that's 95% accurate or better.

You obviously know a bit about perspective too.  I've often been amused at how spacious the interiors of the LMs and CMs look in the video, but they're filmed with very wide-angle lenses so look a lot less like roomy telephone boxes or Volkswagens.  That's probably why one of the HBs at the old board said something about one of the Apollo 11 guys floating "all the way across command module" in the vicinity of the couches.  What???

[Noldi400]

so many of the claims presented did make me unsure of the landings.. he especially pointed out the "earth transparency" clip.
for a while i didnt do much about it, but a couple of years ago he brought it up again. i then procded to research these claims, and managed to find the original video on a nasa site. where it clearly shows it disappears behind the window..

And that's where I really, really get pissed off at Percy and his ilk. He had to have watched that whole video sequence in order to pick out the bits he wanted to use. And it follows that he had to know that his whole "transparency" bit was wrong. And so it follows that he knowingly published a bare-faced lie.

I can try to help enlighten the merely ignorant, or even just shake my head sadly at the clearly delusional, but the people like Percy (and, I suspect, the swear-on-the-bible ambusher) I really have nothing but contempt for.

[JayUtah]

And that's where I really, really get pissed off at Percy and his ilk. He had to have watched that whole video sequence in order to pick out the bits he wanted to use. And it follows that he had to know that his whole "transparency" bit was wrong. And so it follows that he knowingly published a bare-faced lie.

Agreed.  Before David Percy went into hiding, I was able to catch him on a number of bald-faced lies and misrepresentations.  I hold some sympathy for people who are simply ignorant but also have a big mouth.  I wish they'd hold their peace until they were properly educated, but if we enforced that universally there'd be an oppressive silence in the world.  People will shoot their mouths off, and there's little we can do in return but shout a louder and more satisfying truth.  But I hold no sympathy for people who look at the facts but then choose willingly to say something else.  Misguided oafs are far more sufferable than profiteering liars.  Percy's answer to nearly every challenge was, "You must buy both our book and our video to understand our arguments."  Overtly mercenary, if you ask me.

Another great example of David Percy's duplicity is the "Una Ronald" story.  It was obviously bogus from the start and contained a number of factual errors.  Of course Percy wouldn't identify the woman by name, "for her own safety," but had no problem putting her face up on the screen in his video for the world (and the CIA) to see.  At first he tried to stumble through some lame rebuttals for why "Una's" story didn't line up with the facts.  But then in the next edition of Percy's book, all the errors were magically corrected and attributed to "Una."  It doesn't get any shadier than that.

Bart Sibrel makes a similar claim: that the (allegedly) round window bezel on the CM was being used to create a bright "round" Earth out of the view from orbit by being photographed from across the cabin.  At first we caught him on factual grounds:  the window being used for filming was not the hatch window but rather one of the rectangular side windows, and the outer bezel on the hatch window is trapezoidal even if the inner bezel is round.  But we also caught his deliberate edit, where he removed the segment in which the camera clearly backs away from the window to a point across the cabin.  Sibrel edited that out and pretended instead that this is where the camera was the whole time.  That can only be deliberate.

To make matters worse, we found footage in the same reel of the faraway Earth, along with portions of the window frame showing that there was indeed a faraway Earth.  At first Sibrel denied that this footage was part of the package he got from NASA, but then some clever sleuthing on Mark Gray's part showed that Sibrel had quoted from the same footage elsewhere in his film, proving that he indeed had the exculpatory data at his disposal.  When finally confronted with the inescapable facts of his dishonesty, Sibrel claimed the faraway footage was "faked," with no further comment.

Free speech doesn't protect deliberate fraud.  Let the misguided oafs parade their ignorance, if they wish.  But when someone deliberately withholds facts and then charges you money you may not be willing to part with if all the facts were known, then that crosses the line.

[Noldi400]

And here's an example of the damage this crap does...

OK, they're airheads. But this stuff sticks in young minds. Astrobrandt, myself and others have pointed them to Clavius and ALSJ and urged them to look around with their eyes open before they come to conclusions, but who knows?

[Lunchpacked]

And here's an example of the damage this crap does...

OK, they're airheads. But this stuff sticks in young minds. Astrobrandt, myself and others have pointed them to Clavius and ALSJ and urged them to look around with their eyes open before they come to conclusions, but who knows?

those poor girls got atleast 3 detailed explanations by 3 different people (me included)
though it's "better to scare them straight"