When Did the Apollo Hoax Nonesnese start?

I posted the following to the Apollohoax forum back in '04, but it also seems relevant here.

The following may or may not be relvant to this matter but may have some bearing on just how the moon hoax thing got started.

In the editorial ("7/20/69") for the November 1969 (Vol. LXXXIV No. 3) issue of Analog, then editor John W Campbell Jr wrote of the Apollo Eleven footage:

It added to my feeling that this whole thing was a rather primitive science-fiction movie-poorly photographed on old-fashioned black-and-white film and with too much unexplained and seemingly pointless action. We're used to such slick lighting, and efficient choreography and editing in our movies, that the real thing seemed pretty artificial!
Click to expand...
(November 1969 Analog, Page:6)

This comparision between the actual Apollo footage and the output of Hollywood is also made at an earlier point in the editorial:

I have just finished watching the greatest show ever staged; if absolutely nothing ever came of it, that magnificent science-fiction movie...
Click to expand...
(November 1969 Analog, Page: 4)

Now these were the thoughts of a well known science-fiction author, and more to the point someone who knew that the landings were genuine:

...Sol isn't a binary, so filming on location we were stuck with one-source lighting.
Click to expand...
(November 1969 Analog, Page:5)

I'm therefore wondering just how many people had thoughts similar to the one expressed in the first quote and then discussed that impression amongst friends, given the way rumor spreads I'm quite sure that at some point, "It (the footage) gave me the impression I was watching a movie..", became "I'm sure the footage (of the moon landing) I saw was a movie..."

Of course I could be totally wrong...
Click to expand...
Link to original thread

What I meant was that people making comparisions between Kubricks 2001 & the Apollo 11 may have been the cause of the Moon Hoax belief.
 
And as a matter of fact, I thought my relatives were wrong....

Jack by the hedge said:
By the way, I hope it hasn't escaped anyone's attention that Patrick claims to remember discussing Apollo hoax ideas with his Italian relatives and their friends on the very first time he travelled to meet them in 1989. This despite the fact that early in his hoax megathread he claimed to be an Apollo hoax ingénue, who only started looking into it three months previously.
Click to expand...

And as a matter of fact, back in 1989, I thought my relatives were wrong, very wrong...and wrong as well I thought my new Italian friends who mentioned the same thing to me, that they thought Apollo fraudulent.

I never said I knew Apollo was bogus back in my youth. I wasn't smart enough to doubt it from the get go, and had never troubled myself to read any of NASA's own incriminating materials when I was younger. That of course is the key element, NASA's own documents.

It is not uncommon for an educated Italian to question/doubt Apollo based on a general sense for the difficulty in the task. Americans tend to have an unwavering faith in the modern technology of their community. Italians not so. An educated Italian is much more likely to doubt Apollo than an uneducated one.

At a gathering of friends for a dinner party in Shanghai last summer, one of my friends who is a physicist but works primarily as a programmer, said his main source of doubt was that the Americans never went back. Some say why go back to the Marianas Trench, but for this Chinese man, not going back to the moon was like not going back to Antarctica. Sure it was cold and desolate, but there was much to be had, learned, discovered, much there on the moon of great value. In his mind, Marianas Trench comparisons were simply not valid.

When I was in college, I had a big poster of an Apollo CM console in my living room. Until quite recently, Mike Gray's ANGLE OF ATTACK was one of my favorite books, my "Apollo exposure" having been rather limited.

I was 53 years old when I first doubted Apollo, April 22 2011 matter-0-fact, at a swimming party. I saw the Neil Armstrong/Patrick Moore video from 1970 and questioned Apollo's authenticity based on that.

There must have been many people doubting Apollo from the get go. It would be interesting to look into that.
 
Patrick1000 said:
There must have been many people doubting Apollo from the get go. It would be interesting to look into that.
Click to expand...

No...only the very fringe believe Apollo was faked...


All others investigate until they "discover" those hoax believers don't know what the hell they are talking about.


It's not really that "tough" a question.
 
Tomblvd said:
However it was given a new lease on life when the FOX network aired a moon hoax program, largely pushed by Sibrel, IIRC, around 2000.
Click to expand...

I remember seeing that. Funny thing is before then I used to buy into the CT stuff until I saw that, though I was admittedly not as crazy about CTs as some might be. It was that very program that got me to thinking about it all.

Fast forward to less than half a year latter and, as far as I was concerned, there was nothing to CTs.

Hard to believe I used to buy into that stuff, looking back.
 
Tomblvd said:
However it was given a new lease on life when the FOX network aired a moon hoax program, largely pushed by Sibrel, IIRC, around 2000.
Click to expand...

Bart Sibrel was the principal driving force behind the 2001 program Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon?, a.k.a. "the Fox show." It may never have seen the light of day except for its having been produced by the production company operated by Bruce Nash, of Modern Marvels fame. It's likely his clout got it on the air where a lesser producer wouldn't have been able to pitch it.

Keep in mind that Fox is really two independent companies. Fox News is one company and Fox Entertainment is another. They simply share a channel. And this was a time when ratings wars prompted Fox Entertainment to attempt to compete in the marketplace with tawdry and sensationalist programming: World's Most Grisly Car Wrecks, and so forth. After the program aired, many Fox affiliates received a deluge of criticism and indignance. But since the local affiliates are mostly populated by Fox News types, a fairly serious argument broke out between the two Fox factions. When the network re-aired the program, some Fox affiliates (I was informed) refused to air it and aired local programming instead. I heard from an East Coast colleague that his Fox station had a panel of local experts refuting the hoax theory.

In other words, the public backlash was profound. As far as I know, Nash never aired another program on Fox. Mark Gray, executive producer of Spacecraft Films, confirms that Fox Home Entertainment agreed to produce and market his works partly in penance for their airing of the hoax program.
 
Patrick1000 said:
one of my friends who is a physicist but works primarily as a programmer, said his main source of doubt was that the Americans never went back.....for this Chinese man, not going back to the moon was like not going back to Antarctica
Click to expand...


What patently daft, circular reasoning for believing in this idiotic theory. The Apollo Program didn't happen because they didn't go back?

:=]

And anyway, I think you'll find that after Armstrong, the US "went back" quite a few times.


Compus
 
Patrick the reasons for not going back have been political and tied to fnding nothing more, lack of funding killed off Apollo 18, the Russians got beaten to the moon so politcal and therefore funding interest waned.
 
How much of an influence was "Capricorn One", I wonder: while it fed on a pre-existing idea, did it give it a bit more attention?
 
BaaBaa said:
How much of an influence was "Capricorn One", I wonder: while it fed on a pre-existing idea, did it give it a bit more attention?
Click to expand...

May well have been the first exposure that most mainstream people had to the idea and could have prompted some to look into the idea of a hoax. Of course if they actually examined Capricorn One closely they would have realized how absurd the conspiracy in the film is.
 
I was 13 when I saw it and knew it was bs, innately. Haven't seen it since it was in the theater- wasn't one of Big Tells was the fact they were communicating instantaneously with the JPL (or whatever) while on Mars?


I kinda want to see it again!
 
BaaBaa said:
I was 13 when I saw it and knew it was bs, innately. Haven't seen it since it was in the theater- wasn't one of Big Tells was the fact they were communicating instantaneously with the JPL (or whatever) while on Mars?


I kinda want to see it again!
Click to expand...


I think we need to distinguish between two types of major problems with the movie: egregious scientific and engineering errors, such as using Apollo hardware for a Mars mission, and huge plot holes, such as the completely unrealistic "obliteration" (in the original Roman sense of the word) of the guy who noticed the discrepancy in the radio signals. It's been too long since I've seen the movie, but I suspect the lack of delay is due either to the writers' not being aware of it, or else deliberately omitting it as a matter of dramatic license. As such a delay would have been an easy matter for the conspirators to have faked (and allowed time for them to have approved the astronauts' conversations), I see this as a science error rather than a plot hole.
 
There are some watchable performances by Sam Waterston and Elliott Gould in Capricorn One.

The use of Apollo-era hardware was mostly a budgetary choice, allowing the filmmakers to use stock NASA footage (which is almost always royalty-free) and to borrow some actual NASA hardware instead of designing and building their own. However, Peter Hyams later said that it turned out to be a good choice because the verisimilitude offered by actual NASA machinery (however inapplicable from the engineering standpoint) made the story more believable.

I believe in the director's commentary, Hyams says he shopped this project around Hollywood in the early 1970s but had a hard time convincing producers that people would buy the story of a deep government coverup. But after Watergate Hollywood changed its mind dramatically and embraced the "huge coverup" plot line, with all its absurdities.

What I find most absurd is the initial premise that the ECS contractor delivered a faulty product that wasn't identified as such until delivery, and that with two months between delivery and launch the only escape was fraud.

First, the alleged monetary incentive of the contractor is invalid. These are not usually "lowest bidder" contracts but usually "cost-plus" contracts, meaning the contractor makes a fixed profit negotiated ahead of time. This removes the incentive to cut costs dangerously in order to maximize profit.

Second, NASA embeds inspectors and engineers with the major contractors. It is highly unlikely that a major component could make it to acceptance and qualification test with no prior indication of failure.

Third, two months is two months. A lot can be solved in two months. If they put as much energy and resources into fixing the life-support system (or switching to the Plan B, as they did on Apollo when various Plan As didn't pan out in time) as they did into cooking up the hoax, they'd have probably been okay.
 
JayUtah said:
There are some watchable performances by Sam Waterston and Elliott Gould in Capricorn One.

The use of Apollo-era hardware was mostly a budgetary choice, allowing the filmmakers to use stock NASA footage (which is almost always royalty-free) and to borrow some actual NASA hardware instead of designing and building their own. However, Peter Hyams later said that it turned out to be a good choice because the verisimilitude offered by actual NASA machinery (however inapplicable from the engineering standpoint) made the story more believable.

I believe in the director's commentary, Hyams says he shopped this project around Hollywood in the early 1970s but had a hard time convincing producers that people would buy the story of a deep government coverup. But after Watergate Hollywood changed its mind dramatically and embraced the "huge coverup" plot line, with all its absurdities.

What I find most absurd is the initial premise that the ECS contractor delivered a faulty product that wasn't identified as such until delivery, and that with two months between delivery and launch the only escape was fraud.

First, the alleged monetary incentive of the contractor is invalid. These are not usually "lowest bidder" contracts but usually "cost-plus" contracts, meaning the contractor makes a fixed profit negotiated ahead of time. This removes the incentive to cut costs dangerously in order to maximize profit.

Second, NASA embeds inspectors and engineers with the major contractors. It is highly unlikely that a major component could make it to acceptance and qualification test with no prior indication of failure.

Third, two months is two months. A lot can be solved in two months. If they put as much energy and resources into fixing the life-support system (or switching to the Plan B, as they did on Apollo when various Plan As didn't pan out in time) as they did into cooking up the hoax, they'd have probably been okay.
Click to expand...

Bookmarked. Some very good points that us laymen don't consider.

I still think the 'only one person in MCC would notice the signal discrepancy' is the worst plotline. Then his total disappearance as well with nobody noticing?
 
Erock said:
Bookmarked. Some very good points that us laymen don't consider.

I still think the 'only one person in MCC would notice the signal discrepancy' is the worst plotline. Then his total disappearance as well with nobody noticing?
Click to expand...

And as someone pointed out to me years ago they must also have made every phone book in the city disappear as well...
 
JayUtah said:
There are some watchable performances by Sam Waterston and Elliott Gould in Capricorn One.
Click to expand...


Telly Savalas was pretty good, too, as I recall.

JayUtah said:
The use of Apollo-era hardware was mostly a budgetary choice, allowing the filmmakers to use stock NASA footage (which is almost always royalty-free) and to borrow some actual NASA hardware instead of designing and building their own.
Click to expand...


That's what I figured when I first saw it, even though I was only 12. :)

JayUtah said:
However, Peter Hyams later said that it turned out to be a good choice because the verisimilitude offered by actual NASA machinery (however inapplicable from the engineering standpoint) made the story more believable.
Click to expand...


To those ignorant about space and astronomy, of course.

JayUtah said:
First, the alleged monetary incentive of the contractor is invalid. These are not usually "lowest bidder" contracts but usually "cost-plus" contracts, meaning the contractor makes a fixed profit negotiated ahead of time. This removes the incentive to cut costs dangerously in order to maximize profit.
Click to expand...


So John Glenn was only joking when he said he was "sitting on top of two million parts -- all built by the lowest bidder" ?
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top Bottom