http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/tv/foxapollo.htmlFox TV and the Apollo Moon Hoax
(February 13, 2001)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
On Thursday, February 15th 2001 (and replayed on March 19), the Fox TV network aired a program called ``Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon?'', hosted by X-Files actor Mitch Pileggi. The program was an hour long, and featured interviews with a series of people who believe that NASA faked the Apollo Moon landings in the 1960s and 1970s. The biggest voice in this is Bill Kaysing, who claims to have all sorts of hoax evidence, including pictures taken by the astronauts, engineering details, discussions of physics and even some testimony by astronauts themselves. The program's conclusion was that the whole thing was faked in the Nevada desert (in Area 51, of course!). According to them, NASA did not have the technical capability of going to the Moon, but pressure due to the Cold War with the Soviet Union forced them to fake it.
Sound ridiculous? Of course it does! It is. So let me get this straight right from the start: this program is an hour long piece of junk.
From the very first moment to the very last, the program is loaded with bad thinking, ridiculous suppositions and utterly wrong science. I was able to get a copy of the show in advance, and although I was expecting it to be bad, I was still surprised and how awful it was. I took four pages of notes. I won't subject you to all of that here; it would take hours to write. I'll only go over some of the major points of the show, and explain briefly why they are wrong. In the near future, hopefully by the end of the summer, I will have a much more detailed series of pages taking on each of the points made by the Hoax Believers (whom I will call HBs).
So let's take a look at the ``evidence'' brought out by the show. To make this easier, below is a table with links to the specific arguments.
Disclaimer 20% believe in the hoax? The Capricorn 1 tie-in
No stars in pictures No blast crater Dust around the lander
Deep, dark shadows Non-parallel shadows Identical backgrounds
More identical backgrounds Lander unable to balance itself No flames from lunar launch
Astronauts footage shot in slow-motion The waving flag Why was every picture perfect?
Missing crosshairs in photos The deadly radiation of space Did NASA murder its astronauts?
CONCLUSION LINKS FALLOUT
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bad: Right at the beginning, they have a disclaimer:
The following program deals with a controversial subject. The theories expressed are not the only possible explanation. Viewers are invited to make a judgment based on all available information.
Good: The last thing the writers of this program want the viewers to do is make an informed decision. If they did, they would have given equal time to both sides of this controversy. Instead, the vast majority of the time is given to the HBs, with only scattered (and very vague) dismissive statements by skeptics. So the available information is really only what they tell you. Of course, there are a lot of websites talking about this. I have a list of them on my own site.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bad: The show claims that 20% of Americans have doubts that we went to the Moon.
Good: That number is a bit misleading. A 1999 Gallup poll showed it was more like 6%, a number which agrees with a poll taken in 1995 by Time/CNN. The Gallup website [note added Feb. 19, 2007: The Gallup site has been rearranged, and though I can no longer find this quotation, it still jibes with what is on the site now] also says:
Although, if taken literally, 6% translates into millions of individuals, it is not unusual to find about that many people in the typical poll agreeing with almost any question that is asked of them -- so the best interpretation is that this particular conspiracy theory is not widespread.
It also depends on what you mean by ``doubts''. Does that mean someone who truly doesn't believe man ever went to the Moon, or just that it's remotely possible that NASA faked it? Those are very different things. Not only does the program not say, but they don't say where they found the statistic they quote either.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bad: The program talks about the movie ``Capricorn 1'', an entertaining if ultimately silly movie about how NASA must fake a manned Mars expedition. The program says ``The Apollo footage [from the surface of the Moon] is strikingly similar to the scenes in ``Capricorn 1''.
Good: Is it just an amazing coincidence that the actual Moon images look like the movie, or is it evidence of conspiracy? Neither! The movie was filmed in 1978, many years after the last man walked on the Moon. The movie was made to look like the real thing! This statement by the program is particularly ludicrous, and indicates just how far the producers were willing to go to make a sensational program.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bad: The first bit of actual evidence brought up is the lack of stars in the pictures taken by the Apollo astronauts from the surface of the Moon. Without air, the sky is black, so where are the stars?
Good: The stars are there! They're just too faint to be seen.
This is usually the first thing HBs talk about when discussing the Hoax. That amazes me, as it's the silliest assertion they make. However, it appeals to our common sense: when the sky is black here on Earth, we see stars. Therefore we should see them from the Moon as well.
I'll say this here now, and return to it many times: the Moon is not the Earth. Conditions there are weird, and our common sense is likely to fail us.
The Moon's surface is airless. On Earth, our thick atmosphere scatters sunlight, spreading it out over the whole sky. That's why the sky is bright during the day. Without sunlight, the air is dark at night, allowing us to see stars.
On the Moon, the lack of air means that the sky is dark. Even when the Sun is high off the horizon during full day, the sky near it will be black. If you were standing on the Moon, you would indeed see stars, even during the day.
So why aren't they in the Apollo pictures? Pretend for a moment you are an astronaut on the surface of the Moon. You want to take a picture of your fellow space traveler. The Sun is low off the horizon, since all the lunar landings were done at local morning. How do you set your camera? The lunar landscape is brightly lit by the Sun, of course, and your friend is wearing a white spacesuit also brilliantly lit by the Sun. To take a picture of a bright object with a bright background, you need to set the exposure time to be fast, and close down the aperture setting too; that's like the pupil in your eye constricting to let less light in when you walk outside on a sunny day.
So the picture you take is set for bright objects. Stars are faint objects! In the fast exposure, they simply do not have time to register on the film. It has nothing to do with the sky being black or the lack of air, it's just a matter of exposure time. If you were to go outside here on Earth on the darkest night imaginable and take a picture with the exact same camera settings the astronauts used, you won't see any stars!
It's that simple. Remember, this the usually the first and strongest argument the HBs use, and it was that easy to show wrong. Their arguments get worse from here.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bad: In the pictures taken of the lunar lander by the astronauts, the TV show continues, there is no blast crater. A rocket capable of landing on the Moon should have burned out a huge crater on the surface, yet there is nothing there.
Good: When someone driving a car pulls into a parking spot, do they do it at 100 kilometers per hour? Of course not. They slow down first, easing off the accelerator. The astronauts did the same thing. Sure, the rocket on the lander was capable of 10,000 pounds of thrust, but they had a throttle. They fired the rocket hard to deorbit and slow enough to land on the Moon, but they didn't need to thrust that hard as they approached the lunar surface; they throttled down to about 3000 pounds of thrust.
Now here comes a little bit of math: the engine nozzle was about 54 inches across (from the Encyclopaedia Astronautica), which means it had an area of 2300 square inches. That in turn means that the thrust generated a pressure of only about 1.5 pounds per square inch! That's not a lot of pressure. Moreover, in a vacuum, the exhaust from a rocket spreads out very rapidly. On Earth, the air in our atmosphere constrains the thrust of a rocket into a narrow column, which is why you get long flames and columns of smoke from the back of a rocket. In a vacuum, no air means the exhaust spreads out even more, lowering the pressure. That's why there's no blast crater! Three thousand pounds of thrust sounds like a lot, but it was so spread out it was actually rather gentle.
[Note added December 6, 2001: Originally in this section I said that the engines also cut off early, before the moment of touchdown, to prevent dust from getting blown around and disturbing the astronauts' view of the surface. This was an incorrect assertion; it was known that dust would blow around before the missions were launched, and steps were taken to make sure the astronauts knew their height above the surface. Anyway, the incorrect section has been removed.]
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bad: The next argument presented on the show deals with the lunar dust. As the lander descended, we clearly see dust getting blown away by the rocket. The exhaust should have blown all the dust away, yet we can clearly see the astronauts' footprints in the dust mere meters from the lander. Obviously, when NASA faked this they messed it up.
Good: Once again, the weird alien environment of the Moon comes to play. Imagine taking a bag of flour and dumping it onto your kitchen floor (kids: ask your folks first!). Now bend over the pile, take a deep breath, and blow into it as hard as you can. Poof! Flour goes everywhere. Why? Because the momentum of your breath goes into the flour, which makes it move. But note that the flour goes up, and sideways, and aloft into the air. If you blow hard enough, you might see little curlicues of air lifting the flour farther than your breath alone could have, and doing so to dust well outside of where your breath actually blew.
That's the heart of this problem. We are used to air helping us blow things around. The air itself is displaced by your breath, which pushed on more air, and so on. On the Earth, your breath might blow flour that was dozens of centimeters away, even though your actual breath didn't reach that far. On the Moon, there is no air. The only dust that gets blown around by the exhaust of the rocket (which, remember, isn't nearly as strong as the HBs claim) is the dust physically touched by the exhaust, or dust hit by other bits of flying dust. In the end, only the dust directly under or a bit around the rocket was blown out by the exhaust. The rest was left where it was. Ironically, the dust around the landing site was probably a bit thicker than before, since the dust blown out would have piled up there.
I can't resist: another Hoax Believer argument bites the dust.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bad: The next evidence also involves pictures. In all the pictures taken by the astronauts, the shadows are not black. Objects in shadow can be seen, sometimes fairly clearly, including a plaque on the side of the lander that can be read easily. If the Sun is the only source of light on the Moon, the HBs say, and there is no air to scatter that light, shadows should be utterly black.
Good: This is one of my favorite HB claims. They give you the answer in the claim itself: "...if the Sun is the only source of light..." It isn't. Initially, I thought the Earth was bright enough to fill in the shadows, but subsequently realized that cannot be the case. The Earth is a fraction of the brightness of the Sun, not nearly enough to fill in the shadows. So then what is that other light source?
The answer is: The Moon itself. Surprise! The lunar dust has a peculiar property: it tends to reflect light back in the direction from where it came. So if you were to stand on the Moon and shine a flashlight at the surface, you would see a very bright spot where the light hits the ground, but, oddly, someone standing a bit to the side would hardly see it at all. The light is preferentially reflected back toward the flashlight (and therefore you), and not the person on the side.
Now think about the sunlight. Let's say the sun is off to the right in a picture. It is illuminating the right side of the lander, and the left is in shadow. However, the sunlight falling beyond the lander on the left is being reflected back toward the Sun. That light hits the surface and reflects to the right and up, directly onto the shadowed part of the lander. In other words, the lunar surface is so bright that it easily lights up the shadows of vertical surfaces.
This effect is called heiligenschein (the German word for halo). You can find some neat images of it at here, for example. This also explains another HB claim, that many times the astronauts appear to be standing in a spotlight. This is a natural effect of heiligenschein. You can reproduce this effect yourself; wet grass on a cool morning will do it. Face away from the Sun and look at the shadow of your head. There will be a halo around it. The effect is also very strong in fine, disturbed dust like that in a baseball diamond infield. Or, of course, on the Moon.
[Note added June 29, 2001: A nifty demonstration of the shadow filling was done by Ian Goddard and can be found here. His demos are great, and really drive the point home.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bad: Another argument by the HBs deals with shadows. Several photos from the Moon are shown where objects on the lunar landscape have long shadows. If the Sun were the only light source, the program claims, the shadows should be parallel. The shadows are not parallel, and therefore the images are fake.
Good: This is an interesting claim on the part of the HBs, because on the surface (haha) it seems to make sense. However, let's assume the shadows are not parallel. One explanation is that there are (at least) two light sources, and that is certainly what many HBs are trying to imply. So if there are multiple light sources, where are the multiple shadows? Each object casts one shadow, so there can only be one light source.
Another explanation is that the light source is close to the objects; then it would also cast non-parallel shadows. However, a distant source can as well! In this case, the Sun really is the only source of light. The shadows are not parallel in the images because of perspective. Remember, you are looking at a three-dimensional scene, projected on a two-dimensional photograph. That causes distortions. When the Sun is low and shadows are long, objects at different distance do indeed appear to cast non-parallel shadows, even here on Earth. An example of that can be found at another debunking site. The scene (near the bottom of the above-linked page) shows objects with non-parallel shadows, distorted by perspective. If seen from above, all the shadows in the Apollo images would indeed look parallel. You can experience this for yourself; go outside on a clear day when the Sun is low in the sky and compare the direction of the shadows of near and far objects. You'll see that they appear to diverge. Here is a major claim of the HBs that you can disprove all by yourself! Don't take my word for it, go out and try!
Incidentally, the bright Earth in the sky will also cast shadows, but those would be very faint compared to the ones made by the Sun. So in a sense there are multiple shadows, but like not being able to see stars, the shadows are too faint to be seen against the very bright lunar surface. Again, you can test this yourself: go outside during full Moon and you'll see your shadow. Then walk over to a streetlamp. The light from the streetlamp will wash out the shadow cast by the Moon. You might still be able to see it faintly, but it would difficult against the much brighter landscape.
[Note added June 29, 2001: Again, check out Ian Goddard's work for more about this.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bad: The program has two segments dealing with what they call ``identical backgrounds''. In one, they show the lunar lander with a mountain in the background. They then show another picture of the same mountain, but no lander in the foreground at all. The astronauts could not have taken either picture before landing, of course, and after it lifts off the lander leaves the bottom section behind. Therefore, there would have been something in the second image no matter what, and the foreground could not be empty. Obviously, the mountain background is a fake set, and was reused by NASA for another shot.
Good: Actually, the pictures are real, of course. As always, repeat after me: the Moon is not the Earth. On the Earth, distant objects are obscured a bit by haze in the air, and we use that to mentally gauge distances. However, with no air, an object can be very far away on the Moon and still be crisp and sharp to the eye. You can't tell if a boulder is a meter across and 100 meters away, or 100 meters across and 10 kilometers away!
That's what's going on here. The lander is close to the astronaut in the first picture, perhaps a 20 or 30 meters away. The mountain is kilometers away. For the second picture, the astronaut merely moved a few hundred meters to the side. The lander was then out of the picture, but the mountain hardly moved at all! If you look at the scene carefully, you'll see that all the rocks and craters in the foreground changes between the two pictures, just as you'd expect if the astronaut had moved to the side a ways between the two shots. It's not fraud, it's parallax!
Another example of the difficulty in estimating distance is due to the shapes of the rocks on the Moon. A rock small enough to sit down on doesn't look fundamentally different from one bigger than your house. Humans also judge distance by using the relative sizes of objects. We know how big a person is, or a tree, so the apparent size of the object can be used to estimate the distance. If we don't know how big the object is, we can be fooled about its distance.
For an outstanding example of this, take a look at video taken during Apollo 16. There is a boulder in the background that looks to be about 3 or 4 meters (10-13 feet) high. About 3/4 of the way through the segment the astronauts walk over to it. Amazingly, that boulder is the size of a large house! Without knowing how big the rock was when we first see it, we have no way to judge distances. That huge rock looks like a medium sized one until we have some way to directly judge its size; in this case, by looking at the tiny astronauts next to it. [My thanks to Bad Reader Martin Michalak for bringing this video to my attention. My very special thanks goes to Charlie Duke (yes, the Charlie Duke, Apollo astronaut and lunar lander pilot) who emailed me (!) about the difficulty in judging distances due to not knowing the sizes of rocks.]
I will admit the Fox program had me for a while on this one; I couldn't figure it out. But then I got a note from Bad Reader David Bailey, who set me straight. However, the producers of the show should have talked to some real experts before saying such a silly thing as this. If they had checked with the folks who run the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal, for example, they would have been set straight too.
NEW! (February 19, 2001): I found a site that has an animation where the two images of the mountain are superimposed. You need Flash for it, but it's a great animation. The beauty of it is that you can see changes in the mountain range due to parallax!. In other words, this animation is support that the images are real and are not using a fake backdrop. The real beauty of this animation is that the person who put it together is an HB. I like the irony of linking to that animation and using it to show that it is indeed evidence that Apollo did go to the Moon. I love the web!
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bad: The other ``identical background'' segment shows an astronaut on a hilltop. A second video shows two astronauts on the same hill (and this time it really is the same hill), and claims that NASA itself says these two videos were taken on two different hills separated by many kilometers. How can this be? They are obviously the same hill, so NASA must be lying!
Good: Never attribute to malice what you can attribute to a mistake. A videotape about Apollo 16 ironically titled ``Nothing So Hidden...'' released by NASA does indeed make that claim, but in this case it looks to me to be a simple error. I asked Eric Jones, who is the editor of the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal, and he told me those two clips were taken about three minutes apart. Eric's assistant, Ken Glover, uncovered this problem. He sent me this transcript (which I edited a bit to make links to the video clips) of the Fox show with his comments, which I will highlight in red:
