4 minute read
CONSPIRACY’S GREATEST HITS
By Jacques Daviault
Jacques Daviault is a Montreal-based writer and art director with a curiosity that knows few bounds.
Advertisement
The young boy and the great lunar landing hoax
One of my lifelong passions is astronomy and the exploration of space. I’ve also followed conspiracy theories closely, as a believer in my youth and as a campaigner against them in adulthood. They’re an intriguing social phenomenon. And they don’t get much weirder, or less believable, than the Lunar Landing Hoax conspiracy.
Some conspiracy theories are funny – genuinely and absurdly. Unrelated events are strung together by the thinnest threads of supposition and even scantier evidence. Others are more nefarious, and can lead to great harm, ruined reputations, and lies spreading faster than any pandemic. They’re as attractive to those who harbour doubts and mistrust authority as a porch light to a moth. The more removed the theory is from everyday experience, the more likely it is to develop a following.
APOLLO 11 AND A YOUNG BOY WITH STRONG BELIEFS
Enter the Great Lunar Landing Hoax. I’m going to walk you through it thanks to a chance encounter I had 20 years ago at my stepdaughter’s elementary science fair. I encountered a student, no more than 12, who could have been me at the same age. His science fair project was a well-constructed, well thought out argument supporting the lunar landing conspiracy. Multiple photographs, reams of Internet research clippings, and a conviction that he was setting us free from lies and deception.
“Look ... there are no stars in the sky” he insisted. “The flag is fluttering in the wind.” “The images are all absolutely perfect ... there are identical backgrounds in different images ... there are actual letters imprinted in rocks and other lunar artifacts ... there are shadow anomalies ... radiation should have fogged any film stock ...”. He added, “Who filmed Armstrong descending the steps of the LEM?” His arguments were multiple.
Added to this was a host of other flimsy evidence of a more political nature. I’ll forgo the political and stick to the more tangible bits of evidence I shared to debunk this hoax.
A STARLESS SKY
Yup. Neither the sky as photographed from the moon, nor the sky as photographed (under most conditions) from the Apollo Command Module shows stars.
That said, neither do we see any stars in our sunlit skies. The boring fact of it is that analog cameras, like the bulky Hasselblad cameras carried by the Apollo astronauts, just weren’t capable of adjusting the contrast differences between the relatively brightly lit lunar surface and the black sky. It was a question of burning the exposure to catch the brightest stars, or getting great astronaut shots.
OLD GLORY – NEW CONSPIRACY
Lunar Landing conspiracists also point to the supposed flapping of the U.S. flag in video footage. Sure, does look like that. The moon is airless, hence windless, and so it should have hung, limp, like a Trump supporter’s evidence the election was stolen. Truth is, it was supported by a horizontal rod, and the fluttering was seen only at the time of planting or when it was brushed up against.
ONE STEP FOR A COVER-UP. A GIANT LEAP FOR CONSPIRACISTS.
Exactly how was Armstrong filmed from the exterior as he descended the LEM ladder prior to his immortal, and apparently misquoted “one step...” utterance? Simple. A camera mounted on the hull of the lunar lander. It’s clearly visible in photos showing the exterior of the LEM. Conspiracists love this one.
ARMS RACE. SPACE RACE. RACE TO THE BOTTOM.
National pride stood to gain tremendously from being the first to put humans on the moon. The Soviets had their own program, which included a massive N1 booster to lift its crew and equipment out of earth orbit and on to the moon. Sadly, the Soviets were offered a chance to join the U.S. on a joint lunar mission. They declined. Their N1 never got off the ground, failing consistently and offering no safety margins for the crew. Ultimately, the Soviet lunar program was a nationalistic knee-jerk reaction to the Apollo program – rushed, compromised, and fated to fail.
The Soviet-U.S. rivalry was serious. It was a scrappy, confrontational game of marksmanship. Anyone who stops to consider it and the Cold War knows the Russians would have been the first to tell the world, and share the evidence of the American lie.
This, for me, is the final nail in the conspiracy coffin. That and actual images of impressions caused by the descent stages of the American LEM – scattered across six sites on the surface and still clearly visible after 50 years.
SPLASHDOWN
The Lunar Landing Hoax conspiracy has got legs. It has many supporters, even today, in spite of proof to the contrary, in spite of actual moon rocks (shared with the Soviets), and in spite of mountains of verifiable documentation and tens of thousands of dedicated NASA personnel and astronauts who made it all real. In spite of all of that, the conspiracy theory that should have been buried in a lunar crater manages to live on.
The young boy at the science fair listened, and stared back with the eyes of the convicted. He never wavered. I promise I was kind, and gentle with my attempts at deprogramming. He was polite, and respectful in return. Back in the day, I’d have been exactly the same.
