Apollo 11 Moon Landing Revisited: Hoax ~vs~ Debunk

[SuperMurrio]

You are fighting an uphill battle. Not only has every single of your arguments been shown to be false — or even lies — but your position makes no sense just like every other conspiracy theory: thousands of people have worked on this project, and not a single one has come forward during the past 50 years and blown the whistle that they have all worked on the biggest deception project of all times.

The U.S. has notoriously been unable to keep the lid on actual conspiracies, and one with so many participants would never stand a chance of remaining hidden.

As someone once said, they couldn't even keep a secret of Bill Clinton getting a blowjob from a White House intern!

 

[SuperMurrio]

And by the same token, we can't tell it's the Moon. Imagine you want to fake a trip to say, Australia for whatever reason (or anywhere). So you would want to:

1. Establish you were there, perhaps by getting someone to send a card signed by you from there. (= 'We brought Moon rock home'.)
2. Leave something belonging to you there; perhaps your flip-flops in a cupboard, as per photo [which could be from anywhere]. (=The US flag in the photo; and claim you left a load of junk there plus Hasselblads and even some cool footprints [despite no moisture on the Moon to make them].)
3. The proof you were there is that people now eat Marmite, which you took there [which they were already doing]. (= The feel-good factor of claiming you personally left some reflectors on the lunar surface which was a great advance to mankind in pinging the Moon).

See how it works? We are none the wiser as to whether you were there or not but by heck you can convince us that you were.

Good analogy, but where it falls down is that all photographs taken in Australia appear upside-down when viewed 'back home' in the northern hemisphere.

 

[Foster Zygote]

It's interesting to watch Vixen's focus move from factually wrong claims that can be empirically disproved to nebulous games of guilt by association and "could it be" style grasping at straws. Not that she isn't, I'm sure, still brimming with false assumptions about science and engineering that she will confidently trot out in future, but it's clear that she's doing a lot to avoid talking about her many errors.

 

[Andy_Ross]

Remember gravity doesn't exist anyway.

 

[Steve]

It's interesting to watch Vixen's focus move from factually wrong claims that can be empirically disproved to nebulous games of guilt by association and "could it be" style grasping at straws. Not that she isn't, I'm sure, still brimming with false assumptions about science and engineering that she will confidently trot out in future, but it's clear that she's doing a lot to avoid talking about her many errors.

Vixen has shown us years of experience in such tactics over a number of threads. Vixen, in well over 40,000 posts, has yet to make a meaningful point, on any topic, that has been accepted as factual by any knowledgeable poster here. Vixen's posts would be an interesting subject for some budding psychologist's PhD thesis,

 

[Carrot Flower King]

And I'm still waiting for lunar rocks to make an appearance...

That should be fun (for some limited value of fun).

 

[Mojo]

Joke's on her. Wait until she finds out where we got our German rocket scientists from.

Post in thread 'Apollo 11 Moon Landing Revisited: Hoax ~vs~ Debunk'

May 10, 2026

Gather 'round while I sing you of Werhner von Braun,
A man whose allegiance is ruled by ecpedience
Call him a nazi he won't even frown
Nazi, schmazi says Wernher von Braun
Don't say that he's hypocritical
Say rather that he's apolitical
Once a rocket goes up who knows where it comes down?
That's not my departement, says Werhner von Braun!

That kind of German expert?
(Thank you for your service, Tom Lehrer, akways there when we need you!)

• Mojo

• 

 

[grunion]

Vixen has shown us years of experience in such tactics over a number of threads. Vixen, in well over 40,000 posts, has yet to make a meaningful point, on any topic, that has been accepted as factual by any knowledgeable poster here. Vixen's posts would be an interesting subject for some budding psychologist's PhD thesis,

In Vixen’s defense, I only know her, and that fairly recently, from one other thread (Forumvision) in which we are often found, despite our widely different upbringing and cultures, in firm agreement on matters of taste. I’ve found other Forumvision participants (over the last 20 years or so!) to be entirely off the rails in that context but generally sober and logical elsewhere on ISF. Yet I have followed this thread from the beginning and find her posts to be stubbornly ignorant, astonishingly so considering the opinion I held before. Maybe, as you suggest, I’d find other reasons for dismay if I went and searched her posts. But maybe I might find some worthwhile contributions too.

It’s been an interesting case of cognitive dissonance for me (is that the right term) to hold such widely differing views on the same person. It helps me to keep in mind that we are all just pretending to be somebody here. It helps a great deal if I don’t make it personal. Mind you, there have been scores of members over the years who have expressed views and attitudes so abhorrent that I’d be predisposed to not find any of their posts of value.

ETA of course we cannot reasonably pretend to have knowledge and experience we do not possess. Especially in the face of the obvious knowledge and experience of other posters.

@VIX I apologize for talking about you in the third person like that but I couldn’t bring myself to calmly reply to any of your posts here. But Laura Nyro is still awesome, and I think I gave you the 12 this round.

 

[JayUtah]

Uh… what? NASA is no longer a government agency, is actually a publicly traded company, and Elon Musk is a 40% shareholder in NASA?

Obviously all of that is entirely rubbish.

Where did you get this nonsense from?

I'm not sure I want to know.

Rest assured NASA is still a government agency. It has not been "divested," as if such a thing were even possible. It is still taxpayer-funded. It is still very much an independent government agency, meaning it is funded directly by Congress (not through an executive department) and administered by an appointed administrator who has reported directly to the President (not via any department secretary) ever since the agency was formed. Nothing has changed.

No part of NASA falls under the jurisdiction or control of the Dept. of Defense. NASA's charter specifically establishes them as a civilian agency. The charter prevents them from participating directly in any defense-related operations of the United States. They are expressly not "military." They are expressly not "quasi-military." NASA does have original classification authority (similar to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission or the Dept. of State), but almost none of Apollo was classified. The classified parts were mostly the exotic imaging technology such as the low-light television camera and the Moon-mapping cameras. Almost all the Apollo development took place in the public eye, and much of it in the professional literature. A vast amount of the developed technology was directly transferred into the private sector either during the project or shortly thereafter.

Unlike nearly all the other conspiracy theories @Vixen has embraced, Apollo does not revolve around a happenstance event about which reliable information is difficult to obtain. The Apollo program was a decade-long public effort involving hundreds of thousands of people in their pre-existing expert capacities, deliberately and meticulously documented. Interest in this record has only grown since the 1970s. Thousands of competent (and sometimes obsessively-driven) people have delved unbelievably deeply into this evidentiary record and have found nothing amiss or missing.

It's interesting to watch Vixen's focus move from factually wrong claims that can be empirically disproved to nebulous games of guilt by association and "could it be" style grasping at straws.

In order to challenge Apollo on factual, scientific, or engineering terms, the conspiracy theorists have to lie. There's no kind way to put it because there's no kindness in their behavior. I know these people—have known them for decades. @Vixen is just now coming to learn their names and still thinks she can posture them as genuinely curious, genuinely concerned people. They are not. They want your money, and little more. They absolutely do not have any sort of altruistic or journalistic agenda. I have seen these people with their masks off. She has not.

As I said: they have to lie in order to pretend there's a meaningful factual, scientific, or engineering challenge to Apollo's authenticity. They have to lie about the behavior of the nature world. There is literally no legitimate difference of opinion among informed individuals over what the Apollo record establishes—the Apollo missions succeeded as advertised. The hoax claimants don't aim for that audience. They're aimed at people like @Vixen who want to pretend they're smarter than rocket scientists but who really don't know much about the natural universe. The intended audience are lazy people who are easy to fool. They gobble up all the obvious lies because they really just want to believe in conspiracies, hoaxes, and hidden secrets and can't be bothered to legitimately learn the real knowledge.

But because their critics have objectively testable fact squarely on their side, once the enterprise shifts into a debate stage (as opposed to a paid presentation early stage), the debate has to shift to more debatable topics such as government trustworthiness. There is no legitimate factual or scientific controversy, so the only thing the believers have left is a, "Who are you going to believe?" argument. To be sure, there is still some very entertaining pig-headedness: "Just because you can show me examples of sun-cast shadows that aren't parallel doesn't mean my expectations are wrong! Who are you going to believe—me, or your own lying eyes?"

And because there is no legitimate controversy, the hoax claimants have to foist a framework of debate that relies almost exclusively on shifting the burden of proof. The conspiracy theorists have to convince you that merely thinking of some farfetched other way to arrive at the monumental Apollo record qualifies as a meaningful challenge to it, no matter how absurd it sounds and despite absolutely no evidence that this was in fact the way it was done. This impermissibly imposes a standard of proof that says NASA must show that its claim is the only one possible; if someone can imagine another arguably possibly way to get the Apollo record, then NASA's claim fails. This simply sidesteps evidence by treating the evidence itself as a claim that must be proven exclusively correct.

In the hoax mindset, the argument is:

NASA: Here's a picture of the lunar lander on the Moon's surface exactly where we said we landed.​

Hoax: But the picture could have been faked or the lander might have been deposited another way. You have to eliminate these possibilities before we can accept that evidence as probative of your larger claims.​

The hoax claimants absolve themselves of any need to establish their proposed alternatives by any sort of evidence, much less a preponderance of it.

Instead the proper argument is:

NASA: We flew crewed missions to the Moon.​

Hoax: But that claim incurs a burden of proof. Where's your proof?​

NASA: Right here—we explain in great detail how we did it, we provide the customary documentary evidence of success, and we continue to provide empirical evidence of success as the ability to collect it becomes available. We're giving you unfettered access to all of it.​

That's how a burden of proof is properly carried. When the debate proceeds to,

Hoax: But all that could have been faked. You have to show it wasn't.​

it becomes an impermissible shifting off the burden of proof. If you argue that someone's evidence is fake, you have the burden of proof to show fakery. Not just suggest the possibility, but prove with additional evidence that the claimant's primary evidence is best explained by fakery and not by the success of the claim. Rhetorically, that is an affirmative rebuttal. It's a rebuttal that goes beyond claiming the evidence isn't sufficient to support the claim. It proposes another explanation that is supposed to better explain the whole evidentiary landscape. That generally requires you to collect actual collateral evidence that pertains only to the alleged alternative.

If you are accused of a crime and your affirmative defense is that you were elsewhere when the crime was committed, carrying that burden requires you to prove you were elsewhere: credit receipts, security footage, etc. This is collateral evidence. It's not evidence that has anything to do with the charged crime. It's evidence that pertains only to your counterclaim. This kind of evidence is what a defensible hoax claim must collect.

The "multiple studio lights" claim for diverging shadows is a prime example. Hoax claimants say that natural sunlight can't produce those shadows. This is factually wrong, but it's their premise. From this they infer that multiple studio lights must have been used. But they don't develop this theory with collateral evidence. They describe what they think would happen if you did that. But that's just a claim supported by an additional claim, neither of them supported by any evidence the hoax theorist provides. I and others can gather studio lights and show what really happens when you attempt that. You either get multiple shadows from one object or gaps in the lighting coverage. We're the ones doing the actual demonstrations that show how the natural universe actually behaves. We're the ones developing collateral evidence that the alternative is not likely to be true. It's like showing surveillance video that establishes you were never at the place you said you were.

"But Jay," people say, "Why should we trust that you have accurately demonstrated what the hoax claimants are talking about?"

You shouldn't! You should properly place the burden of proof on them. Not the burden of claim, not the burden of handwaving—actually make them demonstrate with their own equipment and knowledge that their declarations of how the natural universe should behave is actually true.

And on the few occasions when they even try this, we see how blatantly they cheat. "Space radiation will damage photographic film," they say. Okay, prove it! And so they dump film into an x-ray machine and blast it with a jillion times more x-ray energy than actually occurs in space. They lie. They provably lie. And since they claim to have the assistance of a physicist in doing this, they knowingly lie. "The intense heat on the lunar surface will bake the film and make it unusable." Okay, prove it! And so they literally bake the film in a kitchen oven in complete defiance of how heat transfer actually works in space. Again, they claim to have physicists helping them, so those physicists are lying.

And this isn't even developing collateral evidence. They fail before they even get there. They fail in demonstrating the premise from which their inference is drawn. They never produce any actual collateral evidence for their affirmative alternative inference.

They know that properly informed people won't be fooled by these shenanigans. Those people aren't the intended audience. The hoax claimants are quite aware that they'll never be able to establish their claims as a legitimate alternative among knowledgeable people. The intended audience is ignorant conspiracy fans like @Vixen who are predisposed to accept a pseudoscientific proof without question and who lack the mental faculties to see through the deception.

Yes, I believe these people should be held accountable for their deception. If skepticism has any value in the world, it is to rid the marketplace of ideas of intentionally deceptive claims and claimants.

 

[Steve]

In Vixen’s defense, I only know her, and that fairly recently, from one other thread (Forumvision) in which we are often found, despite our widely different upbringing and cultures, in firm agreement on matters of taste. I’ve found other Forumvision participants (over the last 20 years or so!) to be entirely off the rails in that context but generally sober and logical elsewhere on ISF. Yet I have followed this thread from the beginning and find her posts to be stubbornly ignorant, astonishingly so considering the opinion I held before. Maybe, as you suggest, I’d find other reasons for dismay if I went and searched her posts. But maybe I might find some worthwhile contributions too.

It’s been an interesting case of cognitive dissonance for me (is that the right term) to hold such widely differing views on the same person. It helps me to keep in mind that we are all just pretending to be somebody here. It helps a great deal if I don’t make it personal. Mind you, there have been scores of members over the years who have expressed views and attitudes so abhorrent that I’d be predisposed to not find any of their posts of value.

@VIX I apologize for talking about you in the third person like that but I couldn’t bring myself to calmly reply to any of your posts here. But I think I gave you the 12 this round.

I have no idea what Forumvision is so I have never opened that thread. If, as you say, she has posted reasonable opinions there it really does open the question as to why she is so off-the-rails in other threads.

 

[Carrot Flower King]

*Applauds Jay's #2649*

 

[theprestige]

The camera was fixed at three settings plus a change of lens was available, so why not a fourth setting for the stars?

Show us on the mission plan where they were supposed to photograph stars with the Hasselblad.

 

[Steve]

Obviously all of that is entirely rubbish.


I'm not sure I want to know.

Rest assured NASA is still a government agency. It has not been "divested," as if such a thing were even possible. It is still taxpayer-funded. It is still very much an independent government agency, meaning it is funded directly by Congress (not through an executive department) and administered by an appointed administrator who has reported directly to the President (not via any department secretary) ever since the agency was formed. Nothing has changed.

No part of NASA falls under the jurisdiction or control of the Dept. of Defense. NASA's charter specifically establishes them as a civilian agency. The charter prevents them from participating directly in any defense-related operations of the United States. They are expressly not "military." They are expressly not "quasi-military." NASA does have original classification authority (similar to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission or the Dept. of State), but almost none of Apollo was classified. The classified parts were mostly the exotic imaging technology such as the low-light television camera and the Moon-mapping cameras. Almost all the Apollo development took place in the public eye, and much of it in the professional literature. A vast amount of the developed technology was directly transferred into the private sector either during the project or shortly thereafter.

Unlike nearly all the other conspiracy theories @Vixen has embraced, Apollo does not revolve around a happenstance event about which reliable information is difficult to obtain. The Apollo program was a decade-long public effort involving hundreds of thousands of people in their pre-existing expert capacities, deliberately and meticulously documented. Interest in this record has only grown since the 1970s. Thousands of competent (and sometimes obsessively-driven) people have delved unbelievably deeply into this evidentiary record and have found nothing amiss or missing.


In order to challenge Apollo on factual, scientific, or engineering terms, the conspiracy theorists have to lie. There's no kind way to put it because there's no kindness in their behavior. I know these people—have known them for decades. @Vixen is just now coming to learn their names and still thinks she can posture them as genuinely curious, genuinely concerned people. They are not. They want your money, and little more. They absolutely do not have any sort of altruistic or journalistic agenda. I have seen these people with their masks off. She has not.

As I said: they have to lie in order to pretend there's a meaningful factual, scientific, or engineering challenge to Apollo's authenticity. They have to lie about the behavior of the nature world. There is literally no legitimate difference of opinion among informed individuals over what the Apollo record establishes—the Apollo missions succeeded as advertised. The hoax claimants don't aim for that audience. They're aimed at people like @Vixen who want to pretend they're smarter than rocket scientists but who really don't know much about the natural universe. The intended audience are lazy people who are easy to fool. They gobble up all the obvious lies because they really just want to believe in conspiracies, hoaxes, and hidden secrets and can't be bothered to legitimately learn the real knowledge.

But because their critics have objectively testable fact squarely on their side, once the enterprise shifts into a debate stage (as opposed to a paid presentation early stage), the debate has to shift to more debatable topics such as government trustworthiness. There is no legitimate factual or scientific controversy, so the only thing the believers have left is a, "Who are you going to believe?" argument. To be sure, there is still some very entertaining pig-headedness: "Just because you can show me examples of sun-cast shadows that aren't parallel doesn't mean my expectations are wrong! Who are you going to believe—me, or your own lying eyes?"

And because there is no legitimate controversy, the hoax claimants have to foist a framework of debate that relies almost exclusively on shifting the burden of proof. The conspiracy theorists have to convince you that merely thinking of some farfetched other way to arrive at the monumental Apollo record qualifies as a meaningful challenge to it, no matter how absurd it sounds and despite absolutely no evidence that this was in fact the way it was done. This impermissibly imposes a standard of proof that says NASA must show that its claim is the only one possible; if someone can imagine another arguably possibly way to get the Apollo record, then NASA's claim fails. This simply sidesteps evidence by treating the evidence itself as a claim that must be proven exclusively correct.

In the hoax mindset, the argument is:

NASA: Here's a picture of the lunar lander on the Moon's surface exactly where we said we landed.​

Hoax: But the picture could have been faked or the lander might have been deposited another way. You have to eliminate these possibilities before we can accept that evidence as probative of your larger claims.​

The hoax claimants absolve themselves of any need to establish their proposed alternatives by any sort of evidence, much less a preponderance of it.

Instead the proper argument is:

NASA: We flew crewed missions to the Moon.​

Hoax: But that claim incurs a burden of proof. Where's your proof?​

NASA: Right here—we explain in great detail how we did it, we provide the customary documentary evidence of success, and we continue to provide empirical evidence of success as the ability to collect it becomes available. We're giving you unfettered access to all of it.​

That's how a burden of proof is properly carried. When the debate proceeds to,

Hoax: But all that could have been faked. You have to show it wasn't.​

it becomes an impermissible shifting off the burden of proof. If you argue that someone's evidence is fake, you have the burden of proof to show fakery. Not just suggest the possibility, but prove with additional evidence that the claimant's primary evidence is best explained by fakery and not by the success of the claim. Rhetorically, that is an affirmative rebuttal. It's a rebuttal that goes beyond claiming the evidence isn't sufficient to support the claim. It proposes another explanation that is supposed to better explain the whole evidentiary landscape. That generally requires you to collect actual collateral evidence that pertains only to the alleged alternative.

If you are accused of a crime and your affirmative defense is that you were elsewhere when the crime was committed, carrying that burden requires you to prove you were elsewhere: credit receipts, security footage, etc. This is collateral evidence. It's not evidence that has anything to do with the charged crime. It's evidence that pertains only to your counterclaim. This kind of evidence is what a defensible hoax claim must collect.

The "multiple studio lights" claim for diverging shadows is a prime example. Hoax claimants say that natural sunlight can't produce those shadows. This is factually wrong, but it's their premise. From this they infer that multiple studio lights must have been used. But they don't develop this theory with collateral evidence. They describe what they think would happen if you did that. But that's just a claim supported by an additional claim, neither of them supported by any evidence the hoax theorist provides. I and others can gather studio lights and show what really happens when you attempt that. You either get multiple shadows from one object or gaps in the lighting coverage. We're the ones doing the actual demonstrations that show how the natural universe actually behaves. We're the ones developing collateral evidence that the alternative is not likely to be true. It's like showing surveillance video that establishes you were never at the place you said you were.

"But Jay," people say, "Why should we trust that you have accurately demonstrated what the hoax claimants are talking about?"

You shouldn't! You should properly place the burden of proof on them. Not the burden of claim, not the burden of handwaving—actually make them demonstrate with their own equipment and knowledge that their declarations of how the natural universe should behave is actually true.

And on the few occasions when they even try this, we see how blatantly they cheat. "Space radiation will damage photographic film," they say. Okay, prove it! And so they dump film into an x-ray machine and blast it with a jillion times more x-ray energy than actually occurs in space. They lie. They provably lie. And since they claim to have the assistance of a physicist in doing this, they knowingly lie. "The intense heat on the lunar surface will bake the film and make it unusable." Okay, prove it! And so they literally bake the film in a kitchen oven in complete defiance of how heat transfer actually works in space. Again, they claim to have physicists helping them, so those physicists are lying.

And this isn't even developing collateral evidence. They fail before they even get there. They fail in demonstrating the premise from which their inference is drawn. They never produce any actual collateral evidence for their affirmative alternative inference.

They know that properly informed people won't be fooled by these shenanigans. Those people aren't the intended audience. The hoax claimants are quite aware that they'll never be able to establish their claims as a legitimate alternative among knowledgeable people. The intended audience is ignorant conspiracy fans like @Vixen who are predisposed to accept a pseudoscientific proof without question and who lack the mental faculties to see through the deception.

Yes, I believe these people should be held accountable for their deception. If skepticism has any value in the world, it is to rid the marketplace of ideas of intentionally deceptive claims and claimants.

 

[Vixen]

In Vixen’s defense, I only know her, and that fairly recently, from one other thread (Forumvision) in which we are often found, despite our widely different upbringing and cultures, in firm agreement on matters of taste. I’ve found other Forumvision participants (over the last 20 years or so!) to be entirely off the rails in that context but generally sober and logical elsewhere on ISF. Yet I have followed this thread from the beginning and find her posts to be stubbornly ignorant, astonishingly so considering the opinion I held before. Maybe, as you suggest, I’d find other reasons for dismay if I went and searched her posts. But maybe I might find some worthwhile contributions too.

It’s been an interesting case of cognitive dissonance for me (is that the right term) to hold such widely differing views on the same person. It helps me to keep in mind that we are all just pretending to be somebody here. It helps a great deal if I don’t make it personal. Mind you, there have been scores of members over the years who have expressed views and attitudes so abhorrent that I’d be predisposed to not find any of their posts of value.

@VIX I apologize for talking about you in the third person like that but I couldn’t bring myself to calmly reply to any of your posts here. But Laura Nyro is still awesome, and I think I gave you the 12 this round.

I shouldn't worry too much, grunion, Steve has always made it clear he hates my guts. As in many cases, there doesn't even have to be a reason for it, so what can one do <shrug> ?

 

[Mojo]

I shouldn't worry too much, grunion, Steve has always made it clear he hates my guts. As in many cases, there doesn't even have to be a reason for it, so what can one do <shrug> ?

Did you read beyond the first three words of Grunion's post?

 

[Foster Zygote]

I shouldn't worry too much, grunion, Steve has always made it clear he hates my guts. As in many cases, there doesn't even have to be a reason for it, so what can one do <shrug> ?

It sure is hard getting that last nail in all by yourself, isn't it?

 

[steenkh]

I shouldn't worry too much, grunion, Steve has always made it clear he hates my guts. As in many cases, there doesn't even have to be a reason for it, so what can one do <shrug> ?

I worry, because I too have seen debates where you may have had the opinion against you, but nevertheless had valid non-conspiracy-theory-based arguments. In this thread you lie about experiments that you supposedly did yourself, but obviously thought you could get away with, and then you go digging for arguments that support your favourite conspiracy theory, and demonstrate an astounding lack of understanding physics. There is not a shred of genuine interest in finding the facts for yourself, and you probably deliberately ignore many posts that are too hard to argue against, and instead changes the subject with more whataboutisms.

Yes I worry, but I don't hate you, and I think this goes for most here.

 

[Vixen]

Obviously all of that is entirely rubbish.


I'm not sure I want to know.

Rest assured NASA is still a government agency. It has not been "divested," as if such a thing were even possible. It is still taxpayer-funded. It is still very much an independent government agency, meaning it is funded directly by Congress (not through an executive department) and administered by an appointed administrator who has reported directly to the President (not via any department secretary) ever since the agency was formed. Nothing has changed.

No part of NASA falls under the jurisdiction or control of the Dept. of Defense. NASA's charter specifically establishes them as a civilian agency. The charter prevents them from participating directly in any defense-related operations of the United States. They are expressly not "military." They are expressly not "quasi-military." NASA does have original classification authority (similar to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission or the Dept. of State), but almost none of Apollo was classified. The classified parts were mostly the exotic imaging technology such as the low-light television camera and the Moon-mapping cameras. Almost all the Apollo development took place in the public eye, and much of it in the professional literature. A vast amount of the developed technology was directly transferred into the private sector either during the project or shortly thereafter.

Unlike nearly all the other conspiracy theories @Vixen has embraced, Apollo does not revolve around a happenstance event about which reliable information is difficult to obtain. The Apollo program was a decade-long public effort involving hundreds of thousands of people in their pre-existing expert capacities, deliberately and meticulously documented. Interest in this record has only grown since the 1970s. Thousands of competent (and sometimes obsessively-driven) people have delved unbelievably deeply into this evidentiary record and have found nothing amiss or missing.


In order to challenge Apollo on factual, scientific, or engineering terms, the conspiracy theorists have to lie. There's no kind way to put it because there's no kindness in their behavior. I know these people—have known them for decades. @Vixen is just now coming to learn their names and still thinks she can posture them as genuinely curious, genuinely concerned people. They are not. They want your money, and little more. They absolutely do not have any sort of altruistic or journalistic agenda. I have seen these people with their masks off. She has not.

As I said: they have to lie in order to pretend there's a meaningful factual, scientific, or engineering challenge to Apollo's authenticity. They have to lie about the behavior of the nature world. There is literally no legitimate difference of opinion among informed individuals over what the Apollo record establishes—the Apollo missions succeeded as advertised. The hoax claimants don't aim for that audience. They're aimed at people like @Vixen who want to pretend they're smarter than rocket scientists but who really don't know much about the natural universe. The intended audience are lazy people who are easy to fool. They gobble up all the obvious lies because they really just want to believe in conspiracies, hoaxes, and hidden secrets and can't be bothered to legitimately learn the real knowledge.

But because their critics have objectively testable fact squarely on their side, once the enterprise shifts into a debate stage (as opposed to a paid presentation early stage), the debate has to shift to more debatable topics such as government trustworthiness. There is no legitimate factual or scientific controversy, so the only thing the believers have left is a, "Who are you going to believe?" argument. To be sure, there is still some very entertaining pig-headedness: "Just because you can show me examples of sun-cast shadows that aren't parallel doesn't mean my expectations are wrong! Who are you going to believe—me, or your own lying eyes?"

And because there is no legitimate controversy, the hoax claimants have to foist a framework of debate that relies almost exclusively on shifting the burden of proof. The conspiracy theorists have to convince you that merely thinking of some farfetched other way to arrive at the monumental Apollo record qualifies as a meaningful challenge to it, no matter how absurd it sounds and despite absolutely no evidence that this was in fact the way it was done. This impermissibly imposes a standard of proof that says NASA must show that its claim is the only one possible; if someone can imagine another arguably possibly way to get the Apollo record, then NASA's claim fails. This simply sidesteps evidence by treating the evidence itself as a claim that must be proven exclusively correct.

In the hoax mindset, the argument is:

NASA: Here's a picture of the lunar lander on the Moon's surface exactly where we said we landed.​

Hoax: But the picture could have been faked or the lander might have been deposited another way. You have to eliminate these possibilities before we can accept that evidence as probative of your larger claims.​

The hoax claimants absolve themselves of any need to establish their proposed alternatives by any sort of evidence, much less a preponderance of it.

Instead the proper argument is:

NASA: We flew crewed missions to the Moon.​

Hoax: But that claim incurs a burden of proof. Where's your proof?​

NASA: Right here—we explain in great detail how we did it, we provide the customary documentary evidence of success, and we continue to provide empirical evidence of success as the ability to collect it becomes available. We're giving you unfettered access to all of it.​

That's how a burden of proof is properly carried. When the debate proceeds to,

Hoax: But all that could have been faked. You have to show it wasn't.​

it becomes an impermissible shifting off the burden of proof. If you argue that someone's evidence is fake, you have the burden of proof to show fakery. Not just suggest the possibility, but prove with additional evidence that the claimant's primary evidence is best explained by fakery and not by the success of the claim. Rhetorically, that is an affirmative rebuttal. It's a rebuttal that goes beyond claiming the evidence isn't sufficient to support the claim. It proposes another explanation that is supposed to better explain the whole evidentiary landscape. That generally requires you to collect actual collateral evidence that pertains only to the alleged alternative.

If you are accused of a crime and your affirmative defense is that you were elsewhere when the crime was committed, carrying that burden requires you to prove you were elsewhere: credit receipts, security footage, etc. This is collateral evidence. It's not evidence that has anything to do with the charged crime. It's evidence that pertains only to your counterclaim. This kind of evidence is what a defensible hoax claim must collect.

The "multiple studio lights" claim for diverging shadows is a prime example. Hoax claimants say that natural sunlight can't produce those shadows. This is factually wrong, but it's their premise. From this they infer that multiple studio lights must have been used. But they don't develop this theory with collateral evidence. They describe what they think would happen if you did that. But that's just a claim supported by an additional claim, neither of them supported by any evidence the hoax theorist provides. I and others can gather studio lights and show what really happens when you attempt that. You either get multiple shadows from one object or gaps in the lighting coverage. We're the ones doing the actual demonstrations that show how the natural universe actually behaves. We're the ones developing collateral evidence that the alternative is not likely to be true. It's like showing surveillance video that establishes you were never at the place you said you were.

"But Jay," people say, "Why should we trust that you have accurately demonstrated what the hoax claimants are talking about?"

You shouldn't! You should properly place the burden of proof on them. Not the burden of claim, not the burden of handwaving—actually make them demonstrate with their own equipment and knowledge that their declarations of how the natural universe should behave is actually true.

And on the few occasions when they even try this, we see how blatantly they cheat. "Space radiation will damage photographic film," they say. Okay, prove it! And so they dump film into an x-ray machine and blast it with a jillion times more x-ray energy than actually occurs in space. They lie. They provably lie. And since they claim to have the assistance of a physicist in doing this, they knowingly lie. "The intense heat on the lunar surface will bake the film and make it unusable." Okay, prove it! And so they literally bake the film in a kitchen oven in complete defiance of how heat transfer actually works in space. Again, they claim to have physicists helping them, so those physicists are lying.

And this isn't even developing collateral evidence. They fail before they even get there. They fail in demonstrating the premise from which their inference is drawn. They never produce any actual collateral evidence for their affirmative alternative inference.

They know that properly informed people won't be fooled by these shenanigans. Those people aren't the intended audience. The hoax claimants are quite aware that they'll never be able to establish their claims as a legitimate alternative among knowledgeable people. The intended audience is ignorant conspiracy fans like @Vixen who are predisposed to accept a pseudoscientific proof without question and who lack the mental faculties to see through the deception.

Yes, I believe these people should be held accountable for their deception. If skepticism has any value in the world, it is to rid the marketplace of ideas of intentionally deceptive claims and claimants.

Look, I honestly think you are incredibly good at explaining things and I know that for people like yourself, Foster Zygote, Axxman, threadworm, et al, Apollo is very dear to your hearts. I have tried very hard, but since watching the OP video, I can't shake off feelings of scepticism. Of course, being sceptical doesn't equate to being right. However, by the same token, being hugely knowledgeable doesn't necessarily mean your strong beliefs are right, either.

Let's see how it goes in 2028 when the Artemis crews have a shot.

I can only ever be sincere and honest, it would be against my value system not to be. It is a shame that the art of debate has been lost.

 

[Mojo]

I can only ever be sincere and honest, it would be against my value system not to be. It is a shame that the art of debate has been lost.

 

[Vixen]

I worry, because I too have seen debates where you may have had the opinion against you, but nevertheless had valid non-conspiracy-theory-based arguments. In this thread you lie about experiments that you supposedly did yourself, but obviously thought you could get away with, and then you go digging for arguments that support your favourite conspiracy theory, and demonstrate an astounding lack of understanding physics. There is not a shred of genuine interest in finding the facts for yourself, and you probably deliberately ignore many posts that are too hard to argue against, and instead changes the subject with more whataboutisms.

Yes I worry, but I don't hate you, and I think this goes for most here.

I think you misunderstood me. When people express hate it is often nothing to do with the person it is aimed at, but as Plato said, think about what others are going through and one can be compassionate and not take it personally.