When Did the Apollo Hoax Nonesnese start?

JayUtah said:
The YouTube link says it all. That guy is one of the most notorious astronaut-stalkers.

As a matter of fact, the Apollo crews have very little interest in these hoax theorists. They're so beneath the radar for those men, and for the overwhelming majority of the aerospace industry and space science fields. They're seen as literally the foil-hat wearing crowd, on par with people who sell magic crystals and who use rattles and dousing rods to pretend to cure cancer. There is zero respect for them in the scientific and engineering community...
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I'll go a little further: there is no interest in them - at all - in the scientific and engineering community. There's no awareness of them other than, yes, there's a lunatic fringe out there. All scientific and high-tech endeavors attract crackpots, but they only serve as an occasional punch line to those working in the space field. That's it. I've worked for and with Apollo engineers, and with Apollo-era and later astronauts, and with a variety of scientists. Not one has ever mentioned hoax claims to me.

The Apollo conspiracists, what few are even left, simply don't matter. It was rather sad - well, until I put him on ignore - to see fattydash/Patrick1000/DoctorTea/forthethrillofitall/etc. make his breathless pronunciations and brag while hiding behind his keyboard. This fantasy that he actually matters, as if anybody having anything to do with Apollo is even aware of his existence, or that he will ever have any effect in the real world, is rather pathetic. If he had ever tried to engage honestly, rather than troll, I might have felt sorry for him.

It's all just a bunch of... nothing, which simply disappears when the Web browser closes.
 
Garrison said:
I think it was just part of showing that the billionaire who owned the company was doing cutting edge space research to tie in with the laser satellite that's the main plot device, I certainly never had the impression it was implying anything about an Apollo hoax.
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That's the impression I got too. The billionaire character William Whyte isn't in the book. Mankiewicz and Maibaum invented him for the movie to substitute for half of the book's mobster villain. The other half of the mobster character is given to the movie character Hans Blofeld. The "secret research facility" isn't in the novel either; the wealth in the book is concentrated in the hotel casinos.

The complete absence from the book of these characters and that desert facility, and their irrelevance to Fleming's plot (much of which survives in the screenplay) is what has led some to speculate that Cubby Broccoli, Mankiewicz, and Maibaum are blowing the whistle on a faked Apollo. However I have found no reason to suppose that any of the three creative forces behind the film plot have any ties to anything that would give them insider information.

The screenplay was written in 1970-71, and it was during this time that Apollo was highly emblematic of American high-tech endeavors. If Broccoli is to be believed when he says his screenwriters created Whyte because he wanted a Howard Hughes character, then the whole scene can be interpreted as, "How do we depict what eccentric billionaires do?" Hughes was a high-tech innovator, ergo so was Whyte. And Apollo iconified high-tech in 1970s.
 
Patrick1000 said:
My view was/is this is a set up, a hoax of its own.....Bart Sibrel, the man who was punched, pushes a view of Apollo reality, a view as to what went down and why, that is beyond ridiculous. It doesn't hold water, not to mention cryogenic liquid oxygen.

Photo's of the punching appeared the very next day in newspapers, including on some front pages. Jay Leno talked about it. It was/is a publicity stunt, a pro astronaut stunt, a pro Apollo stunt, and a very inauthentic one at that, just like the rest of Apollo.

Sibrel, the punchee, is very much a main-streamer, though covertly so. He is an idiot, and his idiocy discrdits the notion of Apollo inauthenticity, get it?

Aldrin is not dumb enough to let this yo-yo, and he is a yo-yo, corner him. Nor would Aldrin have been dumb enough to punch Sibrel out of genuine anger. The whole thing was a silly set-up. That much is obvious......
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Every now and then Doctor Socks is worth the Gox he consumes. This is an inventive claim I've never heard anyone make in quite the same terms before. That Bart was a pawn or a plant, sure. But that the punch was staged...now that's new.
 
Last night, a friend of mine advanced in jest that O.J. was framed because he was about to reveal the true story behind the filming of Capricorn One.
 
Hans said:
...this was often based on a proposed hadith of Mohammed...
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The more conservative of the Hare Krishna also believe, as a matter of religious faith, that the Moon landings were fake because the Moon is unapproachably distant in their reading of the Vedic books on astronomy. Naturally those books do not describe an accurate physical layout of the universe, but they are taken literally by some.

Unfortunately their religious desire to believe in a distant Moon has led some Krishna authors to embrace Ralph Rene and other hucksters.
 
JayUtah said:
That's the impression I got too. The billionaire character William Whyte isn't in the book. Mankiewicz and Maibaum invented him for the movie to substitute for half of the book's mobster villain. The other half of the mobster character is given to the movie character Hans Blofeld. The "secret research facility" isn't in the novel either; the wealth in the book is concentrated in the hotel casinos.

The complete absence from the book of these characters and that desert facility, and their irrelevance to Fleming's plot (much of which survives in the screenplay) is what has led some to speculate that Cubby Broccoli, Mankiewicz, and Maibaum are blowing the whistle on a faked Apollo. However I have found no reason to suppose that any of the three creative forces behind the film plot have any ties to anything that would give them insider information.

The screenplay was written in 1970-71, and it was during this time that Apollo was highly emblematic of American high-tech endeavors. If Broccoli is to be believed when he says his screenwriters created Whyte because he wanted a Howard Hughes character, then the whole scene can be interpreted as, "How do we depict what eccentric billionaires do?" Hughes was a high-tech innovator, ergo so was Whyte. And Apollo iconified high-tech in 1970s.
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That's the reasonable, logical, and plausible explanation; so naturally the CTs will ignore it.
 
Garrison said:
That's the reasonable, logical, and plausible explanation; so naturally the CTs will ignore it.
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Indeed. I think it's the superficial similarity to the common hoax scenario that gets them. They posulate that Apollo photography, television, and film were faked in some remote studio, desert location, or military facility -- often Norton AFB is proposed. Hence when they see a remote desert facility with a simulated lunar landscape in a movie, it hits close to home.
 
JayUtah said:
... is what has led some to speculate that Cubby Broccoli, Mankiewicz, and Maibaum are blowing the whistle on a faked Apollo. However I have found no reason to suppose that any of the three creative forces behind the film plot have any ties to anything that would give them insider information.
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I love how the hoaxers (and truthers, etc.) always think that civilians are privy to sooper seekrit gubmint information.


If Broccoli is to be believed when he says his screenwriters created Whyte because he wanted a Howard Hughes character, then the whole scene can be interpreted as, "How do we depict what eccentric billionaires do?" Hughes was a high-tech innovator, ergo so was Whyte. And Apollo iconified high-tech in 1970s.
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Also, at that time Hughes was notorious for being a recluse, holed up in his penthouse hotel suite. In the movie, Whyte is supposedly hiding in his hotel suite and only communicates with people by phone (actually he'd been abducted by Blofeld.)

Steve S
 
Patrick1000 said:
Italians are hard to convince........I made my first trip to Italy in 1989. My cousins there and several soon to be good friends, informed me they believed Apollo phony. Moreover, they indicated they NEVER had bought in.
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Who raised the topic of Apollo hoax first, you or them?

I made my first visit to Italy in 1992. On that and several subsequent visits nobody told me they believed Apollo phoney. In fact, incredible as it may seem, nobody mentioned Apollo at all.

Perhaps what you actually demonstrated is in fact the opposite - that Italians are extraordinarily easy to convince.

Perhaps we should further infer from the above that the tendency to believe in Apollo hoax stories may be genetic. Patrick's relatives seem to be taken in though nobody here has been.
 
Darat said:
Really? I had never heard about this CT in the UK until a few years back when it got a bit of publicity thanks to a TV show or two. Prior to that I had never heard anyone ever mentioning the silliness.
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Anglia Television in 1977 produced a "We landed on Mars" fake documentary that was broadcast in the UK/Aust/NZ. "Alternative 3". I remember it because it had a Brian Eno soundtrack. This suggests to me that Anglia TV executives, back in 1977, thought that hoaxes based around space travel were considered entertainment by the general UK population. Considering the very popular US "fake Mars landing" film Capricorn One is also from 1977 suggests it was the same entertainment genre in the USA.

It is my personal opinion that current Moon hoax conspiracy people are a legacy from this entertainment genre from a quarter of a decade ago. We get Star Wars (1977) fanatics, so it would seem probable that there would be a handful of "space conspiracy" fanatics from the same period.

Wikipedia on "Alternative 3" UK fake Mars landing documentary from 1977
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_3

Wikipedia on "Capricorn One" US popular "Fake Mars landing" movie from 1977
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capricorn_One
 
I don't know about any of that, but I've met people, adults not kiddies, who are genuinely surprised to learn man has been to the moon.
 
Matthew Ellard said:
Wikipedia on "Alternative 3" UK fake Mars landing documentary from 1977
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_3
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This is probably a poor example because one of the major plot points was the removal of scientists to a well resourced Moon base to continue their research.

This show was probably my first stirings of sceptisim... at the end the signs of life they see is actually just some soil slumping as if something was moving underneath. My first reaction was - oh thats probably permafrost melting from the heat of the decent engines. A little later it struck me the Soviets were not using colour camera recorders in 1962....so it was no suprise when they fessed up to the April fools joke

My favorite Moonhoax media was an April Fools joke done a few years ago in which it is proved Stanley Kubrick pre shot the Apollo Moon walks in return for the use of special NASA lens to film Barry Lindon

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Side_of_the_Moon_(mockumentary)

They even roped Stanley's widow Christina in to the show to add weight to the story.
 
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Jack by the hedge said:
If we're digressing into pedantry, the Howard-Hughes-like character was Willard Wyte, not William.
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Pedantry has more credence than the mind numbing hoax believers.;)

From here...

"Minute 111-115 I actually belly laughed at this section. Here Percy says "rather significantly" the footage from "Diamonds are Forever" showing the scene where James Bond breaks into a complex, discovers a Moon set and escapes.

Percy concludes "the grey dome building looks remarkably like the Northern Hemisphere of the Moon". What a crock!"

I won't post the pic he used, but it is typical hb nonsense and very funny:D
 
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