Looking at that, it sounds as if Allancw might have watched or read some of Bennett & Percy's and Bart Sibrel's "works" during his investigations.
Almost certainly, since he's trying to play the photographic analysis angle (no pun intended). A lot of people have tried to pass themselves off as photo analysts simply by repeating Percy's nonsense. And of course Percy himself represents himself as such, even though it's clear he is not. While he's a credentialed photographer, we see no examples of his work anywhere. Nor does the credential apply to photographic analysis, which is different than photography. And at any rate, Percy clearly just makes up stuff as he goes. He has a list of "photo rules" -- i.e., properties he thinks should hold for authentic photographs and thus be useful in identifying fakes. But they're just his inventions; they have no basis in the relevant sciences. And Percy's last public response to critics came at the heels of having been shown that the cherry-picked photographs he cited in support of one photo "rule" actually break his other "rules."
I see Allan desperately trying to apply the same sort of shadow analysis to other photographs, but getting it obviously wrong. Of course there are so many levels of fail here. (Sorry, gillianren, but "failure" just doesn't have the proper vernacular ring to it.) See below.
Again I have to draw the parallel (again, no pun intended) to Wayne Green. He too bought into Bennett and Percy hook-line-and-sinker and was disappointed when, according to him, I had failed to appreciate Percy's special genius in photographic analysis.
If so, I wonder if he had the good sense to pause and check the part in Sibrel's video "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Moon" where the narrator says, "When objects are lit solely by the sun... then all shadows, regardless of the landscape, will run parallel with one another and never intersect, as shown by this example."
"As shown by this example" is the standard cherry-picked example. Of course it's possible to carefully arrange the objects and landscape to create the illusion of parallel shadows. But it certainly isn't the norm. That's why for every cherry-picked example foisted as "regardless of landscape," there can be displayed innumerable counterexamples showing the effects of terrain, object shape, phase angle, and ordinary perspective.
And lo and behold, the investigator will find that Sibrel's own shadows are certainly not parallel, and if extended far enough would indeed intersect near the edge of the screen.
Indeed; see below.
Which says a lot about the truth, accuracy and reliability, or otherwise, of Sibrel's claims of a hoax.
Mark Gray's tireless efforts showed that Sibrel was indeed aware of the window-edge footage when he cherry-picked his Apollo footage. And there is no question that he edited out the infamous dolly-back away from the CM window.
For the newcomers,
Sibrel's A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Moon contains what purports to be "secret backstage" film footage that was shot but never aired, and which (according to him) shows clear signs that the Apollo 11 crew was faking their allegedly translunar footage from Earth orbit. Sadly, Sibrel misunderstood a title slug on one of the reels he had been sent by NASA and upon that basis merely inferred that his footage never aired. In fact he was showing bits of the live telecast. Other footage didn't air live, but was recorded by MSFN, transmitted to Houston, and was published independently in the 1980s as part of a VHS series of the complete Apollo film record, much as what Mark Gray has done today at Spacecraft Films.
Sibrel's video argues variously that either the circular window or a transparency fastened to the window was used to simulate the distant Earth. He argues there is never any context to show a distant Earth on the television footage. However, in the test downlinks there is several seconds of just such footage, showing the distant Earth as well as a window bezel, and the relative motion between them. At first Sibrel argued that this footage was not part of anything he received from NASA and therefore that NASA had produced it recently to discredit him. But Gray showed conclusively that Sibrel had quoted from other parts of that reel, and hence could have been expected to see and know about it. Further, existing copies of the VHS series were shown also to contain it. Sibrel eventually had to admit it was authentic NASA footage that he had failed to account for, but simply wrote it off as "fake."
Sibrel's video also attempts to argue that in order to create the false footage, the television camera had to be placed across the cabin from the window, not right up in the window as is claimed (i.e., where you would normally position yourself to photograph something out the window). He shows two shots: one of the allegedly distant Earth, and then another clearly from across the cabin as the cabin lights are turned on to reveal where the camera man "really" is. But in the source footage this is one long continuous shot where the initial image is of the distant Earth and then the camera clearly backs away from the window and the astronaut clearly says he is pulling back away from the window and preparing to adjust for interior lighting. Sibrel blatantly edits out the evidence that clearly and convincingly disputes his claim.
Since he believed this was "secret" footage that no one else could ever see in its entirety, he apparently felt that no one would catch this edit. But the bottom line is that it's very easy to make a case that Sibrel knew he was misrepresenting his evidence. Even total incompetence doesn't account for all his "errors." In my judgment, he intentionally and maliciously misstates the evidence.
Likewise, in Bennett and Percy's magnum dopus, "Dark Moon," page 22, there are two photos of tree shadows that they claim are parallel, but the laying-on of straightedges shows that the shadow lines in each photo intersect near the top of the adjacent photo.
This is one of Percy's most annoying gaffes. Not only do the three tree shadows converge, contrary to the author's claim, but Percy actually draws his "guide" line right over one of the shadows!
Of course this is not the preferred method of discerning shadows. Only when you can make informed judgments about the shape of the object and the lay of the receiving terrain can you look at the extent of the shadow in an image and infer directional information from it. The rigorous method of shadow vanishing-point analysis is to connect a feature on an object with the corresponding shadow of the same feature. A "pencil" of such cast rays -- even in image space -- will point either to the light source or to the antipode of the light source, also in image space.
Such shenanigans rank right up there with drawing a line from the top of something in an image to the tip of its shadow in the image and pretending that gives the light-source elevation. Lay persons will likely be fooled by this nonsense, but as Percy has discovered it does not fool anyone. What's even worse is that before publishing his own book, he wrote of this in the
Fortean Times and was shredded by an angry mob of photographers and photo interpreters. He should have looked to than as an indication of how his claims would be received by a wider audience. The fact that he ignored every correction and simply repeated his claims in the book suggests a vast quantity of intellectual dishonesty.
