Bad Astronomy. Misconceptions and Misuses Revealed, from Astrology to the Moon Landing 'Hoax'

It’s because I have evidence for my beliefs. I can point to well-documented, rational, reproducible observations and experiments that bolster my confidence in my conclusions. The examples in the second paragraph above are not similarly supported. The people who believe in such things will bring out piles of evidence, certainly, but it’s written on tissue paper. A solid cross-examination of the evidence finds it flimsy, fragile, and sometimes even fabricated. The experiments rely on hearsay, or second-hand information, or bad statistics, or a nonreproducible event. Such evidence does not ably support a belief system. And it’s definitely not science.

This section has several chapters that deal with pseudoscience, ideas that sound superficially like science, but aren’t anything of the sort. The difference between science and pseudoscience is that science is repeatable, and makes specific predictions that can be tested, while pseudoscience generally relies on single, unrepeated events or predictions that are impossible to test. Of all the forms of bad astronomy, pseudoscience is the most pernicious. You might laugh at some of the attitudes presented; how could a modern person believe that NASA never sent men to the moon? Why would someone think that a fuzzy photo of a piece of ice floating outside a Space Shuttle window is evidence of an alien war with humans?

Odds are that you believe NASA sent men to the Moon. So why devote a whole chapter to the minority that doesn’t? There are several reasons. The most important is to simply provide a rational and reasoned voice when such a voice is hard to find. People who promote pseudoscience sometimes use astronomy, twisting it beyond recognition, and it can be difficult even for astronomers to understand where the arguments go wrong, let alone someone who is not educated in astronomy.

Also, without an opposing voice, a given hoax (and other matters of pseudoscience) can become endemic. Sure, the true believers will never listen to someone like me, but for every one true believer there are perhaps ten others who want to know the truth — call them passive believers — but who are only hearing one side of the story. They need to hear the other side, science’s side, and that’s what I present here.

I receive letters all the time from people who initially believed or at least questioned the claims of a pseudoscientist, but upon reading a rational rebuttal realized the pseudoscientist was wrong. I have hope that rational thinking will win in the end, largely because science produces reliable results. Carl Sagan put it best: “Science is a way to not fool ourselves.”

So let’s take a look at who’s fooling whom.

17. Appalled at Apollo: Uncovering the Moon-Landing Hoax

It’s an engaging story, and almost plausible.

NASA is in trouble. Contractors on the upcoming space mission were negligent, and made a mistake on one of the parts they were building. The mistake was discovered too late, and the part is already integrated with the rocket. They know the part will fail, ending the mission in catastrophe, so they tell NASA. However, NASA officials are under intense public pressure for a successful launch. They know that if they admit there is a problem, the space program (and therefore their paychecks) will grind to a halt. So they decide to launch anyway, knowing the mission will fail.

But the rocket they launch is a dummy, with no one on board. The real astronauts are spirited away to the Nevada desert to a hastily assembled movie set. Under physical threat, the astronauts are forced to obey the NASA officials, faking the entire mission. What they don’t know is that NASA plans on murdering them to protect the secret, then claim that astronaut error killed them upon re-entry. NASA officials would take a hit but eventually would be exonerated.

Does this scenario sound believable? It does to some people. The story certainly interested Warner Brothers, which made this script into the movie Capricorn One in 1978. It’s a pretty good movie, actually, and stars the unlikely group of Eliot Gould, James Brolin, and none other than O. J. Simpson. But remember, it’s just a movie. It’s not real.

Or was it? Despite what the vast majority of the human population believes, some hold that the movie was portraying reality. NASA faked the whole Apollo Moon project, they claim, and instead of its being the most incredible technical achievement of all time, it is actually the greatest fraud perpetrated on mankind. They believe the fraud continues today.

Surprisingly, there appears to be a market for such a belief. James Oberg, an expert on space travel and its history, estimates that there may be 10 to 25 million people in the United States alone who at least have doubts that NASA sent men to the Moon. This number may be about right — a 1999 Gallup poll found that 6 percent of Americans, or about 12 million people, believe the NASA conspiracy theory, the same number found in a 1995 Time / CNN poll. Executives at the Fox Television network thought enough people would be interested in this idea that in 2001 they aired a one-hour program about NASA covering up a faked Moon landing. The program was aired twice in the United States, in February and again in March of 2001 (it was later broadcast in several other countries as well). Combined, the show had about 15 million viewers in the United States alone. Judging from the discussion groups on the web, the radio and television activity about it, and the vast number of e-mails I received in the following months, something about that program touched a nerve in a lot of people.

That such a huge number of people could seriously believe the Moon landings were faked by a NASA conspiracy raises interesting questions — maybe more about how people think than anything about the Moon landings themselves. But still, the most obvious question is the matter of evidence. What manner of data could possibly convince someone that the Moon still lays untouched by human hands?

The answer is in the photographs taken by the astronauts themselves. If you look carefully at the images, the hoax-believers say, you’ll see through the big lie.

My question is, whose big lie? The hoax-believers may not be lying, that is, prevaricating consciously and with forethought, but they’re certainly wrong. Most don’t think they are wrong, of course, and they sure like to talk about it. A web search using the words “Apollo Moon hoax” netted nearly 700 web sites. There are several books and even videos available, adamantly claiming that no man has ever set foot on the Moon.

The most vociferous of the hoax-believers is a man by the name of Bill Kaysing. He has written a book, self- published, called We Never Went to the Moon that details his findings about a purported NASA hoax. Most of his arguments are relatively straightforward. His “evidence” has been picked up by web sites and other conspiracy theorists and usually simply parroted by them.

The evidence worth considering usually comes in the form of pictures taken by the astronauts themselves either on the Moon or in orbit above it. Thousands of pictures were taken by the astronauts, and many of them are quite famous. Some made rather popular posters, and others have been seen countless times as part of news reviews on TV and in newspapers. The overwhelming majority were relegated to an archive where specialists interested in the lunar surface could find them. Most of these consist of picture after picture of the astronauts performing their duties on the surface, and they are unremarkable except for the fact that they show spacesuited human beings standing for the first time in history on the airless plain of an alien world.

Unremarkable, of course, unless you are looking for a dark undercurrent of a NASA conspiracy.

There are five basic concerns raised by the hoax-believers.

These are: (1) there are no stars in the astronaut photos, (2) the astronauts could not have survived the radiation during the trip, (3) there is dust under the lunar lander, (4) the incredibly high temperature of the Moon should have killed the astronauts, and (5) the play of light and shadows in the surface indicates that the photos are faked. There are a host of other “problems,” a few of which we’ll look at after the main points, but let’s look at the biggest first.

1. No stars in the astronauts’ photos

A typical Apollo photograph shows a gray-white lunar landscape, an astronaut in a blindingly white spacesuit performing some arcane function, a jet-black featureless sky, and sometimes a piece of equipment sitting on the surface, doing whatever it is it was built to do.