by John Hamer
No problem there you may think? But you would be wrong. Leaving out the unlikely fact that it is once again almost perfectly ‘composed’, it shows clear evidence of secondary light sources evidenced by the top of the white bag and the ‘United States’ placard amongst several other examples. Below is probably the most iconic of all the moon photographs purporting to depict Buzz Aldrin as photographed by Neil Armstrong.
There are many issues with this photograph too. Again the composition is almost perfect, Buzz’s spacesuit looks badly pressurised and the depth of field is also lacking, invalidating the reason that NASA tells us that stars are not visible in the darkness of the sky. Then there is the noticeable lack of any shadowing on Buzz’s spacesuit. He is casting a shadow on the ground, but there is no corresponding shadowing of his body. Even here on Earth, that is only possible with a secondary light source.
Next, stars are by no means the only omission from the photographs. Also conspicuous by its absence is any evidence that the module actually landed on the lunar surface under its own power. Surely as a result of the reverse thrust from a 10,000lb rocket engine there would be some sort of sign in the surrounding dust in the form mainly of a massive displacement having taken place, perhaps a small crater or at the very least, evidence of dust being caked on the lander’s legs? Even NASA’s own artist depictions of the landings show these phenomena, so why do the photographs show no evidence of this fact?
As may be seen in the photograph below, not a single trace of any dust displacement whatsoever, exists directly below the rocket nozzle. Nor is there any evidence of scorching or displacement of any of the small moon rocks. The intense heat from the rocket motor should also have turned some of the dust to a glass-like substance and again no evidence of this is apparent.
Now let us turn our attention to the ‘magic’ space suits worn by all the Apollo astronauts. These suits were designed to provide all the elements needed to keep alive their human hosts in the most hostile place that human beings have allegedly ever visited. Not only were they able to protect the astronauts from the searing 125pc heat in the sunlit areas of the moon, but they were apparently also able to revert to the opposite extreme in an instant in order to protect the wearer from the numbingly cold -170pc upon stepping from sunlight into the shade. A supreme feat of technological prowess, I am sure you would agree. In addition to this, they were equipped with life-support systems in the guise of providing oxygen and eliminating CO2 emissions as well as the ability to process both liquid and solid bodily wastes.
The suits would also have to be pressurised in order for the human body to survive and the evidence for this fact is most definitely absent from all the extant photographs of the astronauts in situ on the moon. Had the suits been at all pressurised, then their wearers would have in essence resembled the ‘Michelin man’ in the famous tyre advertisements, but of course that would not have created the same aesthetically pleasing effects for the TV cameras and the huge audience ‘back home’.
In addition to all of the above, the suits also would have had to provide the astronauts with full body armour to protect them from the millions of meteroids from which the moon is under almost constant, relentless attack.
“Meteoroids constantly bombard the Moon. Apollo moon rocks are peppered with tiny craters from meteoroid impacts. This could only happen on worlds with so little atmosphere, such as the Moon. Meteroids are nearly-microscopic specks of space dust that fly through space at speeds often exceeding 50,000 mph – ten times faster than a speeding bullet. They pack a considerable punch …the tiny space bullets can plow directly into Moon rocks, forming miniature and unmistakable craters”. David McKay, NASA spokesman
According to NASA itself then, every single piece of moon rock is covered with these minute craters and show evidence of multiple collisions from these tiny but deadly missiles. So in effect what NASA is saying is that the moon is not a safe place to be, with a constant hail of these minute 50,000 mph bullets raining-down on the surface of the moon and it would only need one, just one to penetrate the ‘pressurised’ suit of an astronaut and there is no way he would be making the return trip home again. Fortunately, none of the astronauts on any of the missions, nor the landing modules, nor the moon rovers were ever hit by any of these dangerous, ever-present ‘space-bullets’.
In 2004 President George W Bush announced that the US planned to return to the moon, but that it would take at least fifteen years to achieve this feat. Pardon me? Fifteen years with 21st century technology and know-how to achieve what took only eight years with 1960s technology – amazing stuff indeed. Of course no-one from the mainstream bothered to ask the obvious question as to why it would take almost twice as long with 21st century technology than it did with technology from 40+ years previously, even with the distinct benefit of having ‘done it before’!
However, US Republican senator, Sam Brownback did express a form of disdain at the President’s statement by showing his disgust as follows... “You’ve got the Chinese saying they’re interested – we don’t want them to beat us to the moon!” Obviously someone else who in the heat and excitement of the moment forgot that of course, it had actually been done before.
“Conspiracy theories are always difficult to refute because of the impossibility of proving a negative.” NASA spokesman, July 2009, in response to the so-called moon-landing deniers
This of course is a truly bizarre statement because of course it is not NASA that is being asked to ‘prove a negative’. NASA is being asked to in effect prove that they DID land on the moon and not that they did not. This should be a comparatively easy task if it did happen. For starters they could make available all the allegedly missing data and film and all the blueprints of the hardware that they say they used to achieve this amazing feat and also provide a credible reason for the fact that most of the photographs they allege that were taken on the moon are provably fake.
One of the major problems that the Grumman, the company who designed and built the lunar landers, team faced was how to successfully insulate the entire vehicle from the intense heat of the unshielded sun not to mention the all-but ignored problem of intense space radiation. The spacecraft would have had to have been insulated almost perfectly because there were huge fuel tanks in there and the fuel would boil if not adequately protected. Also, the huge temperature variations on the Moon would cause the craft to buckle and warp which would be disastrous. It may also have been a tiny bit uncomfortable for the astronauts too. Since weight was a huge issue, heavy heat shields could not be used but as luck would have it, the DuPont Corporation had developed a new material, aluminised Mylar. It was gold in colour and supposedly if it was built-up to around twenty-five layers, it would prove to be an excellent insulator. DuPont’s space-age material can be obtained very inexpensively today and is still a very lightweight material. I wonder why it should be then that we never see spaceships wrapped in it any longer?
Then in 1970, just as the whole world was getting complacent about how easy it was to get to the moon and back having now done it on two separate occasions, enter stage right, Apollo 13.
On the 13th April 1970, Apollo 13 was on its way to the moon for the next scheduled moon landing (the 3rd) when disaster struck. Apollo 13’s command and service modules were allegedly rendered powerless by an explosion on the ship whilst around 200,000 miles from home on the outbound leg of the journey. This caused the three astronauts on board to have to retreat into the lunar landing module, whose functions were still operational, in order to survive. Not only did this allegedly keep the three astronauts alive but the lunar lander’s engine also enabled them to ‘sling-shot’ around the moon using centrifugal force and plot a course back to Earth. However, the Apollo 13 astronauts were then faced with another life-threatening situation; carbon dioxide was rapidly building in the ship’s confined airspace. Lithium hydroxide cartridges were supposed to be available to remove the carbon dioxide, but there was a limited supply of these cartridges in the la
nder. As luck would have it though, there were additional cartridges in the command module but unfortunately these were incompatible; the command module’s cartridges were square while those in the lander module were round.
So what did the intrepid crew do to overcome this problem? They used duct tape and tubing from the spacesuits, plus an ‘old sock’ according to one of the trio, Gene Cernan, to rig-up a temporary fix and enable the incompatible cartridges to work as normal. It was indeed fortunate that next week’s laundry was just lying around there on the floor. There were no seats in the lander as it had been decided that they would just add unnecessary weight. And also, there was just barely room for two people in the space allegedly now being occupied by three. All three, had this been a real life-and-death situation would have been wearing bulky spacesuits, boots, gloves and helmets. Somehow, they had to co-exist for four days and during that time all that separated them from the extreme hazards of outer space was a double layer of aluminum foil. One microscopic meteoroid or one misplaced foot would result in immediate destruction of the ship and instant death for the three ‘heroes’.
I wonder why it is by the way, that the Apollo 13 astronauts were said to have been very cold throughout their return flight in their allegedly crippled ship? As recalled by Jim Lovell… “The trip was marked by discomfort beyond the lack of food and water. Sleep was almost impossible because of the cold. When we turned off the electrical systems, we lost our source of heat and the sun streaming in the windows didn’t much help … It wasn’t simply that the temperature dropped to 38pF, (4pc) the sight of perspiring walls and wet windows made it seem even colder. We considered putting on our spacesuits, but they would have been bulky and too sweaty … We found the CM a cold, clammy tin can when we started to power up. The walls, ceiling, floor, wire harnesses and panels were all covered with droplets of water.”
Where does one begin to analyse all that? For starters, why were they short of food and water at all? The trip had been curtailed by at least three days and as for the sun ‘streaming in through the windows’, how could the sun generating as it did, around 125pc of heat, not make a significant difference?
And what about the water droplets covering the interior of the command and lunar modules? Would not most of those droplets have become airborne in a zero-gravity environment? Would not the inside of the module have looked something akin to a child’s snowstorm-globe? All utterly preposterous nonsense, I am afraid.
In 1929, the famous German film-maker, Fritz Lang, produced a film by the name of Die Frau in Mond which translates into English as The Woman in the Moon. Did this film provide the blueprint for the ritualistic procedures that were adopted for the Apollo programme? As can be seen in the still-shots below, all of the elements were present; the unnecessary vertical construction of the spaceship in a specially built hangar, the grand opening of the massive hangar doors, the excruciatingly slow roll-out of the upright rocketship from the hangar to the launch pad, the raucous crowds watching the spectacle live and even the now ubiquitous ‘countdown’ sequence. Even the shedding of two stages of the ship was there. In other words, the only elements of the performance that the public ever actually witnessed were all lifted directly from a forty-year-old (at the time) silent film.
Fritz Lang’s technical adviser on the film was Herman Oberth, considered to be one of the three founding fathers of rocketry and assisting Oberth on the film project, according to the Time-Life book To the Moon, was one of his brightest students, nineteen-year-old Wernher von Braun. A decade-and-a-half later, both Oberth and von Braun would be recruited through Project Paperclip (see WWII chapter for more details) and brought to America to work on, among other things, the Apollo programme, whose modus operandi just happened to very closely match that of the very same fake moon-launch Oberth and von Braun had colluded upon forty years earlier.
In case you were wondering, the two screen-shots above were from the aforementioned 1929 silent film and not from footage of the Apollo 13 ‘near-disaster’. However one could be forgiven for thinking that, given the ‘plot’ similarities.
So, as always, we need to ask the pertinent question, why would they do it? Why would they go to all that trouble just to fake the moon landings and perpetuate this myth for more than four decades? And why and how could so many apparently intelligent people have been fooled by it all?
The most obvious answer and the one most frequently quoted by moon-landing sceptics, is that it was in order for the US to reclaim their national pride that had been stripped-away by the fact of America being solidly beaten in the space-race by the Soviets over a prolonged period of time. While this undoubtedly played a significant role, there are other factors also, factors that have not been explored as comprehensively as they might have been. However, before we analyse these other factors, we need to ask the question as to whether it would even have been possible to perpetrate a hoax on such a large scale.
Firstly, it is true to say that not everyone was deceived by the alleged Moon landings. Although it is not widely recognised today, a significant number of people were more than sceptical about NASA’s television productions of the events. Wired magazine reported that, ‘when Knight Newspapers polled 1,721 US residents one year after the first moon landing, it found that more than 30% of respondents were suspicious of NASA’s ‘trips to the moon.’ And this is highly significant in itself, given that overall trust in government was considerably higher in the 1960s and 1970s, the fact that nearly a third of Americans doubted what they were ‘witnessing’ through their television sets is quite remarkable. But of course without the benefits of the Internet it was much more difficult to share information in those days, especially contentious information which would be filtered by the controlled mainstream media. Real information and statistics were thus not as widely distributed as today.
But of course, all the pro-Moon-landings websites conveniently omit to mention that of the people who experienced the events ‘as they were happening’ that almost 1-in-3 had doubts, a number considerably higher than one would imagine. And also, perhaps needless to say, the pro-NASA apologists fail to mention that 1-in-4 young Americans, still have doubts about the Moon landings today.
Returning then to the question of why such an egregious hoax would be perpetrated on an unsuspecting world, we need to travel back in time to the year 1969. Richard Nixon had just been inaugurated as the US President after the successful elimination of his strongest rival for the Presidency the previous year by the ‘lone-nut gunman’, Sirhan Sirhan (RFK) and his election to the highest office was based largely on his promises of winding-down the hugely unpopular war in Vietnam. However the truth was that the Elite had no intentions of ending the war at all and indeed, the exact opposite was true. His brief from his hidden masters was actually to escalate the conflict as widely as possible, but in order to do so, he needed to bring about a huge diversion, a means by which the patriotic fervour of the American people could be stimulated to undreamed-of new heights and so that they would blindly follow, wherever he may lead them.
Traditionally this tactic has often been facilitated by governments perpetrating short-term, low-risk military ‘sabre-rattling’ of one kind or another, but the huge problem for Nixon was that military entanglements are exactly what he was attempting to divert attention away from.
However, with not a moment to spare, Apollo 11 embarks upon its historic, heroic mission on the 16th July and with the entire American nation if not the world, in its thrall, five days later the lander allegedly sets-down on the Sea of Tranquility. Vietnam is all-but forgotten temporarily and American hearts burst with patriotic pride upon winning the race to the Moon. There is obviously no time to worry about hideous conflicts across the other side of the world whilst Neil Armstrong is taking his ‘giant leap for mankind’.
However, the ‘honeymoon period’ is short-lived as just four months later, in early November 1969, the story of the brutal murder of over 500 civilians in the village of My Lai (The My L
ai Massacre) breaks, bringing home to Americans the cold-blooded savagery of the Vietnam war once again. So then, time for another spectacular diversion and Apollo 12 duly departs on the 14th November, embarking upon another perfectly trouble-free lunar adventure before returning ten days later. America is once again mesmerised by its new heroes and suddenly the depressing old war news is off the front pages yet again.
Now let us fast forward slightly to March, 1970. A CIA-backed coup ousts Prince Sihanouk in Cambodia and Lon Nol is ‘selected’ by the US as his replacement. Cambodia then immediately joins the conflict and promises troops for the US war effort and the conflict is then even-further escalated in April when Nixon sanctions an invasion of Cambodia by US infantry forces, in yet another move engineered by the warmonger-in-chief, Henry Kissinger. Nixon has by this time been in office just over 12 months and the war, far from ‘winding-down’, has been substantially ‘wound-up’ by expanding into Cambodian territory.
Enter the knights in shining armour of NASA yet again. However, this next Moon mission was not to be just simply any old Moon mission as it turned-out. Having now had two successful missions go by with consummate ease and without the merest suggestion of a problem of any kind, the US population, not exactly renowned for their overly-long attention spans, had already begun to regard the moon adventures as a little too ‘easy’. And so, what was needed to regain the public attention was a little injection of drama, not to mention extreme mortal danger.