Shifting accountability is another classic Aulis stunt. They published an anonymous film clip as actual footage of the Surveyor taken during the Apollo 12 landing. Mary Bennett assured us it was legitimate NASA footage, although couldn't account for its provenance. Under pressure she finally admitted it was taken from a German documentary on Apollo. She insisted that any fault for it not being original NASA footage, as she claimed, must certainly lie with the producers of that film, not with her. Under further pressure she admitted that the documentary didn't purport it to be actual footage of the landing.
Similarly, in researching the "Una Ronald" story, I followed up on the claim that the West Australian had published letters from people noting, as had "Una," that there was an errant soda bottle bouncing across the lunar surface in the television coverage. Aulis authors claimed they had contacted the West Australian to confirm this, but were met only with silence. When I asked the same question as they, I got an answer back within 24 hours to tell me the archivist had scoured the issues for two weeks after the Apollo 11 mission and had found no such publication. Again Mary Bennett foisted blame for that onto the West Australian, maintaining that while they may have been kind and polite to me, they had ignored her.
But then the whole "Una Ronald" story itself stinks to high heaven. As does the "Bill Wood" or "Woods" story, the "David Groves" story, and the whole faculty of hitherto unknown Russian academics they rely upon. It seems that Derek has learned the lessons well from his publishers about how to escape intellectual accountability for claims he intends to use to make money.
