Fake Moon Landing aka The Moon Landing Hoax aka The Moon Landing Lie (part1)
Wednesday, March 5th, 2008Fake Moon Landing part1:
In the last few years, we have become increasingly alarmed as a particularly silly and damaging “urban myth” has begun to take hold. Promoted by a few well known authors such as David Percy and the late James Collier, this latest twist on the current “conspiracy nation” fad is based on a simple, if unbelievably naive and absurd notion — that the Apollo Missions and subsequent Moon landings were faked. Admittedly, we thought this whole issue was put quite nicely to rest in August 1997, when Enterprise Mission principal investigator Richard C. Hoagland “debated” Collier on Art Bell’s “Coast to Coast AM” radio program. The results of that debate can only be described as an unmitigated humiliation for Collier, who turned out to be totally out of his element and misinformed on the general subjects of space travel, physics, engineering, NASA, and Apollo itself.
Yet still, it rears its ugly head today. Even after Percy’s Fortean Times article was pretty much taken apart by readers, references to the “fake” landings began to creep into popular culture, springing up in such diverse places as Jay Leno’s “Tonight Show” monologue and commercials featuring ESPN’s Chris Berman. Usually, the references were tongue-in-cheek, but when we heard that the Fox network was planning a full scale special on the issue, we decided the time had come to say something.
Let us be clear; we are all uniformly, unabashedly, “conspiracy theorists” here. We are 100-percent convinced that there has been a cover up by NASA of some extraordinary discoveries made in the course of the agency’s 40-year year history. That said, one thing they did not do, unquestionably, was fake the Moon landings. In fact, most of the charges made, not just by Collier and Percy, but by others who have picked up the mantle of their assertions, are so absurd, so easily discredited, so lacking in any kind of scientific analysis and just plain common sense that they give legitimate conspiracy theories — like ours — a bad name. Frankly, we suspect that may ultimately be the point of this whole thing after all.
Almost from the moment that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin set foot upon the Moon at Tranquility Base, the rumors began that the whole thing was faked. We have always felt that there was something a little more to this than simple stupidity or naïveté. Something a bit insidious about the whole thing. We assumed that as time went by, the notion would weaken and falter, rather than gain momentum as it has recently. We have come to wonder, given our own stance on the whole question of what the Moon program was really about and what the astronauts really found, if there wasn’t perhaps something a bit “conspiratorial” about the promotion of this patently absurd and demonstrably false conspiracy theory.
As you will see, some of these charges can actually be more easily explained not just by a complete rejection of the Moon Hoax theory, but a combination of conventional explanations and our own “glass ruins” model of the Moon. The way light scatters on the Lunar surface; the size of solar reflections in the visors of the astronauts (which are way out of proportion to their counterparts on modern day Space Shuttle missions); the sometimes secretive stance taken by the astronauts and the Agency; the very peculiar qualities of the film in the cameras taken to the Moon by the astronauts, all point to something bigger and more interesting than we have been led to believe by NASA itself. But, we suspect that the promotion of this particular idea — that the Apollo astronauts never went there at all! — which is so easily discredited (as we will do below), is designed to lessen the blow when revelations regarding what NASA has really found across the Solar System begin to happen … later this very year.
If NASA is eventually forced to admit that there was more to the Face on Mars than meets the Eye, that maybe they missed something “the first three times around,” or that there is truly something “ancient and extraordinary on the Moon” … then it will be crucial to have thoroughly discredited the “conspiracy theorists” out there (read: us). Remember, it is our position (and has been for some time), that this millennium cycle, the 2000-2001 period, is the beginning of an ongoing pattern of disclosure. Up to now, we had assumed that this would come in a series of significant revelations; of outright announcements that things are not quite what we had been led to believe. But now, we suspect that there will simply be a series of much smaller releases — like simply taking a new image of the Face on Mars and releasing it without comment — and pretending that the “Eye” isn’t there staring back at them. If enough people can be convinced by this deliberate disinformation campaign that “there are no NASA conspiracies” — by the deliberate promotion and then effective debunking of obviously bad conspiracy theories like “We Never Went To The Moon” — then it will be much easier to sell the idea that NASA “just missed a couple of things” on those Mars pics all those years ago. And certain people, deeply implicated in the cover-up, will neatly escape the consequences for their theft over more than forty years of our entire space program!
So this then appears to be the political agenda. We plan to “scotch this thing once and for all” — as a JPL spokesman was heard to say about the “Catbox” image of the Face on Mars — in order that we might make clear the differences between what we have alleged, and the way that the powers-that-be would like you think about all things conspiratorial.
Fake Moon Landing will be continued …
