Debunking the Apollo landing conspiracies

[Silvercrest]

Yeah, I clipped a newspaper article about the enlightened Charles K. Johnson (and his thousands of followers!) back in the 1980s. Still have it, someplace.

A year or so later I was part of a trivia competition. I got my team to call themselves Zetetic Society, based on Johnson's group.

 

[RAMA]

Debunking something believed by irrational faith is completely unnecessary. That faith is much like religion, you can't really challenge it with facts because the faith remains.

RAMA

 

[publiusr]

Perhaps--but we may have a new book to deal with the woo:
http://cosmoquest.org/forum/showthr...x-thread-belief-systems&p=2284259#post2284259

There are a few other minor proponents left, but they are clearly out on the fringe and seem to adopt the same approach of vigorous well-poisoning rather than any sort of logical or scientific study. Of the former crop of authors, Rene, Jack White, and Kaysing have died, as apparently has Patrick of a Thousand Socks. Of that class, only Sibrel and the Aulis authors remain, the former still struggling for relevance and the latter having withdrawn from any further public dialogue.

The Good Guys are winning

 

[Dryson]

One of the biggest factors of the anti-moon landing crowd is that they believe that reality comes from certain people who control people so much that the group actually believes that if the person at the center says something is true or not then it how the person at the center says it is. Most of the the time the central figure is not very educated where the group will be even less educated than the central figure so that the masses are kept delusional and believing that the central figure has all of the answers. Not even wrong.

 

[Kor]

• Dr Robert Sungenis - Geocentrism Geocentric Cosmology ("It's all relative!")

His doctorate is not in the physical sciences. So him using it as a mark of authority in this regard makes about as much sense as Noam Chomsky being in philosophy and political economy instead of linguistics.

And I hereby posit the "Kor-centric" theory of cosmology. *I* am the center of the universe. *I* am always stationary, and everything else in the entire universe is always moving around me.

Kor

 

[Metryq]

• Dr Robert Sungenis - Geocentrism Geocentric Cosmology ("It's all relative!")

His doctorate is not in the physical sciences.

Whether it is or not is irrelevant. (Many significant contributions in science have been made by "outsiders.") However, I did list him in the same breath as flat-earthers because his geocentric arguments are as easy to debunk.

This reminds me of that early scene in GHOSTBUSTERS when the dean is kicking the group off campus. You can hear the sarcasm in his voice as he addresses Venkman by title, "Doctor Venkman."

And I hereby posit the "Kor-centric" theory of cosmology.

I can get behind that. After all, he was important enough to have cameras monitoring him. The moment he exceeds the speed of light, he becomes a warp Kor.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

Debunking something believed by irrational faith is completely unnecessary. That faith is much like religion, you can't really challenge it with facts because the faith remains.

RAMA

One of the biggest factors of the anti-moon landing crowd is that they believe that reality comes from certain people who control people so much that the group actually believes that if the person at the center says something is true or not then it how the person at the center says it is. Most of the the time the central figure is not very educated where the group will be even less educated than the central figure so that the masses are kept delusional and believing that the central figure has all of the answers. Not even wrong.

This paragraph is way too meta for me to parse it properly, but it doesn't appear to be correct. From what I've seen, the "moon hoax conspiracy" theorists get most of their information from youtube videos, word of mouth or books written by other conspiracy theorists. If there's a "central figure" directing all of this, the average hoax believer has no idea who that central figure is and is mainly just uncritically repeating information they were exposed to from what appeared to be a legitimate source they otherwise know nothing about and didn't bother to vet.

 

[{ Emilia }]

I just have to ask: It the Apollo hoax still a thing? Are there really people who still believe this nonsense? I thought these days everybody's just joking about it.

I've never met anybody who believes nonsense like that but then again Europeans aren't nearly as much into conspiracy theories as Americans are.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

I just have to ask: It the Apollo hoax still a thing? Are there really people who still believe this nonsense? I thought these days everybody's just joking about it.

I've never met anybody who believes nonsense like that but then again Europeans aren't nearly as much into conspiracy theories as Americans are.

Here's a Wikipedia article that discusses it, with sources listed in the article.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_landing_conspiracy_theories#Public_opinion

In a 1994 poll by The Washington Post, 9% of the respondents said that it was possible that astronauts did not go to the Moon and another 5% were unsure.[194] A 1999 Gallup Poll found that 6% of the Americans surveyed doubted that the Moon landings happened and that 5% of those surveyed had no opinion,[195][196][197][198] which roughly matches the findings of a similar 1995 Time/CNN poll.[195] Officials of the Fox network said that such skepticism rose to about 20% after the February 2001 airing of their network's television special, Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon?, seen by about 15 million viewers.[196] This Fox special is seen as having promoted the hoax claims.[199][200]

A 2000 poll conducted by the Public Opinion Foundation (ru) (ФОМ) in Russia found that 28% of those surveyed did not believe that American astronauts landed on the Moon, and this percentage is roughly equal in all social-demographic groups.[201][202][203] In 2009, a poll held by the United Kingdom's Engineering & Technology magazine found that 25% of those surveyed did not believe that men landed on the Moon.[204] Another poll gives that 25% of 18–25-year-olds surveyed were unsure that the landings happened.[205]

There are subcultures worldwide which advocate the belief that the Moon landings were faked. By 1977 the Hare Krishna magazine Back to Godhead called the landings a hoax, claiming that, since the Sun is 93,000,000 miles away, and "according to Hindu mythology the Moon is 800,000 miles farther away than that", the Moon would be nearly 94,000,000 miles away; to travel that span in 91 hours would require a speed of more than a million miles per hour, "a patently impossible feat even by the scientists' calculations."[206][207]

James Oberg of ABC News said that the conspiracy theory is taught in Cuban schools and wherever Cuban teachers are sent.[157][208] A poll conducted in the 1970s by the United States Information Agency in several countries in Latin America, Asia, and Africa found that most respondents were unaware of the Moon landings, many of the others dismissed them as propaganda or science fiction, and many thought that it had been the Russians that landed on the Moon.[209]

Something that Russians and Fox News viewers can share with the Hare Krishnans....

 

[Kor]

I've never met anybody who believes nonsense like that but then again Europeans aren't nearly as much into conspiracy theories as Americans are.

How about Erich Von Daniken

But seriously, I've never met anybody in everyday real life in the US who believes it either. I think crackpots just tend to be very vocal, and hungry for media attention.

Kor

 

[137th Gebirg]

...and Giorgio Tsoukalos from Ancient Aliens - lovingly referred to as "the hair dude". He's of Greek ancestry, born in Switzerland.

Love the most recent advert for the current season of the show. My opinion of him went up a couple notches for him knowing he doesn't take himself too seriously...

I don't think either he or Von Daniken believe the landings were a hoax, though. IIRC, they believe that they happened but something was found that caused us never to return. That is actually the more prevailing conspiracy theory among such communities, now-a-days. Granted, there are still some who think it never happened, but I don't waste much time dwelling on that. As mentioned in prior posts, it's at the same bar as "Flat-Earth Society" nonsense.

 

[Kor]

^ Yeah I didn't mean to directly connect Von Daniken with the moon landing hoax idea. I was just talking about crackpot conspiracies in general.

• Dr Robert Sungenis - Geocentrism Geocentric Cosmology ("It's all relative!")

His doctorate is not in the physical sciences.

Whether it is or not is irrelevant. (Many significant contributions in science have been made by "outsiders.") However, I did list him in the same breath as flat-earthers because his geocentric arguments are as easy to debunk.

Good point about outsiders...
I think it must be hard for an academic to switch to a different field and be credible in his new field.
There was a professor of German history (can't remember his name) who later became interested in the parallels between modern Japan and Germany. With much work, he eventually became a respected historian of modern Japan.

That example is still within the same discipline, though. I think it's different when someone in religious studies (essentially humanities) is trying to be taken seriously in the area of cosmology, which falls within the completely different discipline of natural sciences, and promoting something that is completely out of line with current scientific thinking. I doubt that he is familiar enough with the necessary research methodologies to even begin to approach the subject in a credible manner. But Joe Public might think "Oh he's a 'doctor', that means he's an expert!"

Kor

 

[JarodRussell]

Have there been people in the 60s thinking it was a fake (if so, what reason did they have to assume that), or is it a problem with newer generations?

 

[137th Gebirg]

Don't know if it went that far back (wouldn't be surprised if it did), but it was certainly a thing in the 70's. The movie Capricorn One was about a faked Mars landing, which basically embraced a lot of the prevailing theories about the Apollo missions at the time.

 

[Ithekro]

I think I recall meeting someone who thought the moon landings were faked, but he was also heavily into alien sighting, and high hidden caches of Japanese war materials prepared in case the Americans invaded in 1945 (there were some, and the numbers of airplanes was correct, just that he failed in noting the types of airplanes...mostly trainers and civilian in origin, not the top end high tech fighters he was going off on).

I think his theory was that the landing were staged as a coverup for the aliens.

 

[Starborn Dragon]

The problem with these people is not that they believe, but they expect everybody else to believe the same thing.

And those that don't well they just insult and berate them to no end.

So you don't talk to them.

You just shoot them.

Live and let die.

 

[{ Emilia }]

The problem with these people is not that they believe, but they expect everybody else to believe the same thing.

And those that don't well they just insult and berate them to no end.

So you don't talk to them.

You just shoot them.

Live and let die.

That's awfully close to trolling. Let's not do that again, okay?