I guess Stafford suffers from a bit of excess ego for him to make that claim of closest splashdown. Goes with the territory I guess.
Not necessarily. There has been plenty of talk here, or at the old board, about how unreliable eyewitness accounts of dramatic events can be, and the main reasons I can think of are:
1. Our memories are often coloured by our perceptions and experiences.
2. Our brains are extremely good at filling in missing details, even by making them up. **
3. Our view of an event may have been limited.
4. Many of us have a natural tendency to exaggerate.
5. Over a long period we often merge unrelated but similar details or events.
I've kept diaries since 1972 -- just brief "what-I-did-today" entries -- and have often been horrified to find on re-reading them that I've embellished a story over the years when I really intended to tell it factually.
A good example is back in January 2002 when I showed a five-year-old visitor satellites for the first time. It was a beautiful, warm, clear, first-quarter-moon, summer night and she was enjoying herself because it was the holidays and she was allowed to stay up as long as she liked. So after sunset I looked up HeavensAbove and found that around 11pm there were going to be five of the brighter satellites high in the sky over a period of about 12 minutes. Asked her if she wanted to see them and she didn't even know what they were.
Being a bright kid, she got a tremendous kick out of learning what they were and seeing them, and even finding some herself because I told her where and when to look, turned my back, then told her how clever she was when she excitedly exclaimed about two satellites almost crossing paths.
That story above is accurate, but over the years when telling it, it grew, with the number of satellites increasing and the number of minutes decreasing, changing to about eight or ten in nine minutes. Had I carried on and not checked, the original numbers would have probably reversed.
I've had plenty of other cases of doing the same thing and have a few recent videos of Apollo astronauts reminiscing, and yes, when you know the original details it's very clear that they also do it. In one documentary Bill Anders seems to give Frank Borman that bemused look that says, "Not quite, Frank. Didn't exactly happen that way!"
The saddest thing about that sort of thing is that some hoax-believers, being out of touch with how the real world works, will exclaim that they are deliberately lying to cover things up. Not at all!
Just curious if this has been discussed here before. I can't seem to search the archives for some reason. Username and password too new perhaps?
Don't recall such a discussion, but that doesn't mean anything! Does the link at the bottom of my last post take you to the thread at the old board? It works for me.
** Just noticed. Whose brain
didn't fill in the missing "l" in the thread's title?
[Fixed typos and a lack of clarity. Oldfartitis strikes again!]
