The Apollo Moon Landings

                A more recent controversy I have heard is that the Apollo moon landings were a hoax. I believe it has for the most part died down, but I still would like to address it.

                On July 20, 1969, astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin of Apollo 11 were the first men to walk on the moon. Michael Collins remained in lunar orbit. A great moment for the history of mankind…and yet, people say there is evidence to prove it never happened.

                First off I’d like to say that there were six moon landings in the Apollo program. Seems to me like an awful long time to carry on a hoax like that. So right up that is a red flag in my mind against the conspiracy theory.

                The thing I hear pointed out most is the way the flag flutters in footage, though there is no wind. The most logical explanation I can give for this is that the astronaut placing the flag is causing it to move. All the videos I’ve seen have an astronaut messing with it, so that is my best guess. Really I can’t totally explain this one though.

                “There are no stars in any of the pictures”. This one is easy. The moon reflects light, we can tell this just by going outside and looking up at it. This reflection is intense enough to keep you from noticing stars in the pictures. It doesn’t make much sense just explaining it, so instead I have a picture of Chicago at night. The lights of the city are so intense you cannot see the stars. It is the same basic concept. And even if you ignore this fact, you have to take into account exposure time. To photograph stars is nearly impossible. Ever tried it?

                One thing I’ve heard a lot is that there is some report published by a Russian scientist in the 1950’s saying the moon is too radiated for a human to be on it. If the Russians truly believed this would they have not disputed the Apollo missions? I mean, seriously, what country wouldn’t want the chance to be the first to do something major like walk on the moon? I just don’t buy the radiation thing, but I must admit I don’t know enough about this one. Somebody help me out.

                The fact that there is apparently no crater beneath the Lunar Module I just flat out consider dismissible. On earth in weighed thirty-five thousand pounds. At one sixth gravity that would be less than six thousand, no? And just because it blows some dust doesn’t mean it will make a crater. I just can’t even try to buy into this one.

                Temperatures on the moon can reach some crazy extremes, and conspiracy theorists like to point out that the photographs should have either cracked or frozen at those temperatures. I believe however than because space is a vacuum, the heat is not as concentrated. But it’s very hard for me to honestly make a good reasoning for this.

                I also hear pretty often that the lighting “clearly shows” faking of images. I kind of think it’s ridiculous to assume that a more craterous, smaller, more reflective lunar body like the moon would shadow objects on its surface exactly the same way Earth does.

                The lunar rover was folded to fit into the landing module. That is that.  The argument, "the lunar rover is soooo big!!! There's, like, no way it could have been brought up there!", is just annoying. The rover was not "too big".

                After reviewing the evidence my conclusion is that the astronauts on Apollo 11 did indeed land on the moon. The fact that most leads me to believe this is the first fact I pointed out: that there have been five more missions since. It’s just too big of overkill in my mind. There would be no logical reason to do five more when we already had the honor of being the first if it wasn’t real.

               

     

***Some Images Were Removed From This Page To Avoid Potential Lawsuits and/or Shutdowns. My apologies***

          

References:

Wikipedia (For images, dates, names, and description of events only)

http://www.ufos-aliens.co.uk/cosmicapollo.html (Interesting skeptics site)

http://www.apollo-hoax.me.uk/basics.html (Good believer site)

http://www.apolloarchive.com/apollo_gallery.html (Tons of images to make your own conclusions)

Coming up next week: Terrorism, the Red Herring?