Good books about the moon landings hoax?

[dwight]

"The Thread". Sounds like the title of a horror film.

[JayUtah]

Yeah, I did Fortran in college - using punch cards (c.1977).

I still have a few boxes of punch cards and some 9-track tape reels in the basement.  Or attic.  I forget.

I played around with QuickBASIC quite a bit in the 90s, mostly writing astronomy programs.

By then I was writing my astronomy programs in C.  My original astronomy programs were written in Fortran.  You know, 300-element harmonic equations -- the stuff Fortran is really good at.  So after hours you could go in and mount up your tape and say something like

//EPH42 JOB (JPW1138) 'JAY EPHEM RUN' CLASS=A, MSGCLASS=0, MSGLEVEL=(,1)
//             EXEC PROC=FORTCLG
//FORT.SYSIN   DD DNSAME=JEPHEM, UNIT=2401, VOLUME=SER=JPW04,
//                DISP=(OLD,KEEP)
//GO.SYSIN     DD *
+420320.00 -0924513.21 19790822 230000-06
/*

The first five cards you'd have in your desk with rubber band around them because you're going to use them a jillion times.  But you had to go over to the 029 and punch the data card, the one after GO.SYSIN.  You'd be a steely-eyed missile man if you could decipher what the data format is and what it means.

Then you dropped the cards in the hopper "face-down, nine-edge forward," or sometimes "face-down, top edge to the back."  Those were our mantras.   You have to add the last card, a pre-punched stack of which was always available on the reader.  (You were supposed to put them back after your job was entered, the IBM equivalent of "take a penny, leave a penny.")

Then you push START.  The reader ingested your cards and gave them back in the tray to the side.  Or, if they were too well used, the reader would eat one and jam, forcing you to take the reader apart and fish out the lacy corpse of a some DD card that took you 17 ABENDed jobs to get right and which you now need to repunch.

Then if everything went right up to this point, the tape would spin wildly one direction, then the other, stop, and cautiously inch its way forward for a couple seconds.  Then silence for several seconds.  Well, "silence" in a machine room means no sound other than enough fans blasting to deafen a bomber pilot.   The line printer would clatter to life and on your wide fanfold sheet, neatly lined up on green and white yardlines, would be a row for each planetary body -- its rise/set times and azimuths, zenith azimuths, phase, right ascension / declination and altitude and azimuth angles for the input.

I laboriously translated all those 300-element harmonic equations into C at one point.  That was a lot nicer, since running the program was so much more convenient.  And the computer was faster.

I eventually put a Sunview window around it so you could see an actual display of the night sky, and an overhead model of the solar system with the planets where they were in their actual geometrically-correct orbits (mapped onto the ecliptic).  That's how I discovered there was a bug somewhere in Saturn, because it retrograded for a bit as you spun time fast enough to watch the planets orbit.  Not as if I really want to proofread hundreds of floating-point coefficients to figure out which one is wrong.

And I sort of left it there and went on to other things.

Today I can usually accomplish what I need to using Excel.

Which is probably quite a lot, considering most people around me end up using it just to format a table of static data.

[Jockndoris]

Thank you for sending a free copy of your book.  I will read it tonight.

Mr. Burns, if I ask you some questions about your book in a non-confrontational manner, will you agree to answer them honestly and candidly?

Most certainly yes   look forward to receiving them  Jockndoris

Excellent.  I'll start with these three so as not to overwhelm you.

- On pg. 54, you recount how, in 2013, the apparition of Neil Armstrong revealed, "We knew of course that if we were found by anyone then the whole game would be up and the Moon Hoax would become public, and we would be disgraced and we wanted to avoid that at all costs", referring to, as your book describes it, a splashdown and subsequent recovery which did not go as planned.  How do you reconcile his stated need for secrecy, with your earlier account of playing golf in full view of other witnesses, and flying with him and other passengers in an airliner on July 20th, 1969? 

beedarko
here is my answer to the third part
Hiding on the golf course.
Effectively they had no choice. Having agreed to do the Hoax they had to carry it through. They knew that no one would be looking for them as they would be glued to their TV sets. 

When I popped up on the plane it was manna from heaven because it gave them something to do while they were waiting and somewhere where they thought they didn’t have hide as it was all within their controlled barracks amongst friends.

The golf course is a very special place.   Most presidents of the USA play golf including both of the George Bush’s and they could never be disturbed on the golf course.  And like you no one would think they would have the cheek to parade on the golf course.    If anyone had reported them for any reason they would have been called lunatics as everyone knew they were on the Moon.  Remember that golfers must never be disturbed on the golf course. Even if their wife is on the phone - don’t interrupt him he is playing golf!

I agree they had to have lots of nerve to do it but they had just agreed to fool 1 billion people and that needed a bit of nerve.  Just like I am for suggesting it now!
I can confirm that that is what happened and I recall it now in just the same way.
jockndoris

[Bob B.]

Jay, you're giving me flashbacks of the old university computer lab.

Honestly, I don't remember Fortran at all; I took one class and never used it again.  BASIC I remember pretty well.  I planned at one time to teach myself C++ but never got around to it.

[sts60]

Jockndoris, your explanation is not merely absurd, but also self-contradictory.  You had said they had to be brought back to Earth stealthily; now you have them casually strolling golf courses and flying with random civilians.

You have simply made up up your story.

[sts60]

I will also add that I don't find such a cockamamie story interesting or entertaining even as fiction, so since you cannot provide a reason to give it any further attention, I think I'll move in to asking you to support your claims about Mars.

[smartcooky]

Burns, answering questions about your lies with more lies is not answering the questions.

You must be truly delusional if you think that any sane, reasoning person believes any of the bullshit in your glorified pamphlet, or any of the hephyr dust you have posted here in support of your ludicrous and demonstrably false claims.

In answer to the first question you will obviously want to ask me next: No, I have not read your glorified pamphlet (nor do I ever intend to) but I don't need to do so in order to know that the two main claims you make therein (namely, that you were visited by the ghost of Neil Armstrong, and that you played golf with he and Edwin Aldrin while they were supposed to be on the moon) are false

In answer to the second question you will obviously want to ask me: No, I do not want a copy of your glorified pamphlet!!

See the first line of my signature!

You sir, are a liar and a fraud!

[JayUtah]

When I popped up on the plane it was manna from heaven because it gave them something to do while they were waiting and somewhere where they thought they didn’t have hide as it was all within their controlled barracks amongst friends.

No.  This is the most absurd claim ever.  You were asked to reconcile a glaring contradiction in your story, and you've only underscored it.

The golf course is a very special place.

This paragraph is entirely irrelevant supposition.  (The rest of you imagine what it's like to read 60 pages of this dreck.)

I agree they had to have lots of nerve to do it...

Not an answer.  Inexplicably going from extreme caution to pointless bravado is just restating the contradiction you've been asked to reconcile.  Don't simply marvel at the contradiction -- explain it.

Just like I am for suggesting it now!

No, Mr. Burns, you're not a hero.

If you want to show us your mettle, show us better that you're willing to prove your farfetched claims.  Or, if you really want to show us you have nerve, come out and say, "You got me; it's just a bit of fiction."

I can confirm that that is what happened and I recall it now in just the same way.

No, you cannot confirm that's what happened.  That's the point of this line of questioning:  you're telling an absurd story, claiming it's true, and providing absolutely no testable evidence.

[RAF]

When I popped up on the plane it was manna from heaven...

....you served the in-flight meal?

[JayUtah]

Honestly, I don't remember Fortran at all; I took one class and never used it again.

It's still a vital language, although you wouldn't recognize its modern (ca. 1990) syntax.  Post-Columbia NASA developed a lot of custom fluid-dynamics code to evaluate TPS damage using high-resolution digital photos taken from the ISS during approach.

BASIC I remember pretty well.  I planned at one time to teach myself C++ but never got around to it.

C++ is incredibly baroque.  Try Python instead.

[nomuse]

I find his rationalizations of the golf story almost vaguely make sense -- if he intends that Aldrin was running the conspiracy personally.

He seems to have forgotten they are not the ones giving orders. Not the ones spending billions of dollar and committing crimes in the process of this cover-up. The astronauts were a small (but important) cog, and it would be a poor conspiracy indeed that let them personally determine whether their boredom was worth a huge security risk.

But, alas, this is out of character in any case. After months in training, and facing such things as weeks in medical quarantine, a couple of fortnights away while the mission was actively being faked are not exactly going to be untoward hardship! This doesn't even include the possible need for them, plus the necessary movements to get them of the launch pad, and out to a high altitude aircraft somewhere over the Pacific (or whatever particular scenario Jock thinks is plausible).

Another thing, though. The way Jock describes the golf course, he seems to be implying that all of the military -- all branches -- are in on the secret. Or at least can easily and instantly be sworn into accommodation of the secret. His hand-wave of "It's okay, they only let military people in" sounds to me a whole lot like the typical inflationary conspiracy school...the sort that start with a hoaxed space mission and end up declaring the entire Cold War a hoax.

[nomuse]

Feh. I haven't gotten far enough in C++ for it to scare me. At my level, it might as well be Python. I find it a lot easier to work with then BASIC. It seems to flow better, organize better, it just sort of "feels better in the mouth" (if that makes any sense.)

(C#, on the other hand, gives me a headache).

[JayUtah]

Feh. I haven't gotten far enough in C++ for it to scare me.

We used an in-house design and manufacturing system that was 4 million lines of C++, back in the early 1990s.  Luckily the software guys who maintained it were incredibly talented and kept the code base very well groomed and logical.  I learned a lot about proper C++ practice from those two.  One of them was a fellow Larry Niven fan, so that was nice.

For utility programming these days I really do favor Python.  It's a well-built language organized around simple, solid princples with a helpful and enthusiastic user community and a large runtime library.  And it has enough esoteric features to keep the computer scientist side of me happy.

[JayUtah]

...it would be a poor conspiracy indeed that let them personally determine whether their boredom was worth a huge security risk.

That's part of the "local color" test.  As you say, out of character.

Another thing, though. The way Jock describes the golf course, he seems to be implying that all of the military -- all branches -- are in on the secret.

Another part of the "local color" test.  We've already spoken a bit about how much Burns' specific claims are a caricature of actual U.S. military procedure, look, and feel.  The claims he's made here seem to indicate he just assumed the U.S. military works for most purposes just like the U.K. military.  (It does not.)  That's the big failure of the "local color" test, and supports the hypothesis that it has all been made up by someone guessing how things work.

I remember a long time ago some British author purported a suppressed conversation allegedly from an Apollo crew seeing aliens or something.  He had the crew saying, "Hallo, Houston, Apollo 11 calling..." just as the dashing RAF characters would say in British war movies.

[smartcooky]

I remember a long time ago some British author purported a suppressed conversation allegedly from an Apollo crew seeing aliens or something.  He had the crew saying, "Hallo, Houston, Apollo 11 calling..." just as the dashing RAF characters would say in British war movies.

Bwwwhahaha! First thing that popped into my head (after my keyboard got spattered with coffee)  was.....

Funny aside: they use codenames so that they can't be identified,
and then Maj. Smith gives away his position. Go figure

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