That's basically because most HB's know that the ordinary reader has not actually studied the Apollo record.
That's certainly true of Percy, who takes blatant liberties with the record. And also of Bart Sibrel, but we aren't talking about him at this point. This is how they take a doctored frame here and there, or a 2-second clip from a 30-minute continuous telecast, and try to convince you that's all anyone ever saw of Apollo visual information. I can remember watching live Apollo video practically nonstop. And contrary to Percy's claims, the uncut video has been available ever since the missions were flown.
Percy claimed to have a fairly encyclopedic knowledge of the Apollo record and claimed to have studied the original material in the form of contact transparencies and high-quality professional film or video dupes. In his video he makes a big show of having one of his guests unroll a contact dupe master. And in another scene he holds a large U-Matic cassette, implying that it's a high-quality Apollo video dupe. But then as we studied his work for a couple of years, we realized that he had merely downloaded much of it from early NASA web sites or other convenience sources. He was using badly digitized copies of photographs and trying to attribute errors in the duplication to original NASA errors. And we discovered him making false assumptions that would not have arisen had he actually seen the original or early-generation source material. The most egregious of this was the alleged off-center center fiducial in the -5903 image, which Percy had downloaded in cropped from from some web site.
There were the obvious errors of attribution too. We already discussed the "original" Apollo 12 landing footage that Percy insisted had come from NASA. He tap danced for a number of months over that. But in the end he could not explain why the Apollo 12 landing footage that
actually came from NASA bore no resemblance to what he depicted. Finally he had to admit he'd cribbed it from a documentary, and that he knew all along that had been the source of it. He tried to rehabilitate his authority by saying he had no reason to suspect his third-party source had misled him, but it pretty much put a huge nail in his coffin as a serious Apollo "researcher." If you can't be bothered to authenticate your material, and the authentic material has been staring everyone in the face for decades, you really can't pass yourself off as a serious scholar.
No, hoax believers are looking for the most uninformed person in the room, hoping to sway their opinion.
Indeed, by presenting them with the illusion of knowledge in connection with the neurological payoff of being let in on a secret. Hoax believers generally just express blind faith in hoax authors (e.g., "Nobody gets everything right, I'll just give him the benefit of the doubt") and expect that their critics or converses do likewise. In their minds they acknowledge that they're just taking a hoax author on faith, and project that their critics are just taking someone else on faith. They don't immediately realize that their critics have expertise of their own and dispute the hoax claims on a rational basis, not a faith basis.
