40 Years Of Stuborn Conspiracy Stupidity
Tuesday, July 14th, 2009I am old enough to remember sitting in front of the television with the rest of my family and watching the Apollo 11 moonwalk live. In living black and white. I remember thinking that surely nothing is beyond man’s grasp, now that manned interplanetary travel has been proven and accomplished.
Heck, we’d probably be strolling on Mars by 1980 at this rate, right? Well, as we all know, I was completely wrong there.
The fact that the space program, for all intents and purposes, was killed off shortly after the flight of Apollo 17 by the government budget process is only one of the harsh realities which sully the memory of America’s greatest scientific achievement. The other harsh reality is the existence of the conspiracy theorists who, to this day, claim that man never went to the moon.
Their theories have all been debunked by a plethora of highly-educated scientists and ordinary citizens too. They have been ridiculed for decades, yet they still cling to the belief that the U.S. government of the late 1960′s was able to convince the more than one million people involved with the space program to keep their mouths shut for over 40 years to keep the cover-up secret.
The New York Times talks about one of these whack jobs in an article published on July 13th, 2009:
Mr. Sibrel, who sells his films online, has hounded Apollo astronauts with a Bible, insisting that they swear on camera they had walked on the Moon. He so annoyed Buzz Aldrin in 2002 — ambushing him with his Bible and calling him “a coward, and a liar, and a thief” — that Mr. Aldrin punched Mr. Sibrel in the face. Law enforcement officials refused to file charges against Mr. Aldrin, the second man on the Moon.
In an interview, Mr. Sibrel said that his efforts to prove that men never walked on the Moon has cost him dearly. “I have suffered only persecution and financial loss,” he said. “I’ve lost visitation with my son. I’ve been expelled from churches. All because I believe the Moon landings are fraudulent.”
Well, we may finally be able to put the lie to these nutcases and their wild theories once and for all, thanks to the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO). The LRO was launched by NASA on June 18, 2009 and tasked with:
LRO will spend at least a year in a low polar orbit approximately 50 kilometers (31 miles) above the lunar surface, while its seven instruments find safe landing sites, locate potential resources, characterize the radiation environment and test new technology.
In addition, the LRO is taking high resolution photos of the surface of the moon, which will include at least some of the Apollo landing sites.
Jesus Diaz: Would the LRO return images of the moon landings when it flies over them?
Grey Hautaluoma (NASA Headquarters, Office of Public Affairs): Yes, it will. We don’t have a timeline yet for viewing the Apollo sites, but it will be in the near future.
My insides tell me that whatever the photos reveal, the crackpots will just come up with another conspiracy theory to explain them away, like they have done with the lunar rock samples. Oh well, at least the normal people will know that they’re full of dung.
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July 15th, 2009 at 8:31 am
I was living in San Antonio (Harmony Hills, 5th grade) at the time of the Apollo 11 moon landing and space walk. It was a big deal for me because I got to stay up and watch it live.
Nice article, thanks
July 20th, 2009 at 11:00 am
National Geographic channel ran a good special recently, debunking the myths of the tin-hat moon landing conspiracy theorists, one by one. It was good, not great, but did address every one of the common complaints. All of the arguments just sound sillier to me than they did before. For example Q: “Why are there no stars in the background of photos from the lunar surface?” A: “For the same reason we don’t see stars in our own sky during the daytime – our eyes and cameras adjust for exposure of daytime brightness and stars just don’t register. Just because the sky is black on the moon rather than blue doesn’t mean it’s night time!”