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

The shadows cast by the astronauts, rocks, and other surface features appear to be nonparallel, but this is just an effect of perspective, similar to the apparent converging of railroad tracks on the horizon.

Have you ever stood on a set of railroad tracks and seen how they appear to converge far away, near the horizon? This is an effect of perspective, of course. The railroad tracks are parallel (they wouldn’t be much use if they weren’t), but our eyes and brain interpret them as converging.

The same thing is happening in the lunar photographs. The shadows don’t appear to be parallel because of perspective. When comparing the directions of shadows from two objects at very different distances, perspective effects can be quite large. I have seen this myself, by standing near a tall street lamp around sunset and comparing its shadow to that of one across the street. The two shadows appear to point in two very different directions. It’s actually a pretty weird thing to see.

Again, this is something that can be investigated quite literally in your front yard, and is hardly evidence of a multibillion-dollar conspiracy.

There’s an interesting lesson here about the claims of the hoax-believers.

In many cases they use simple physics and common sense to make their points. Usually their initial points make sense. However, they tend to misunderstand physics, and common sense may not apply on the airless surface of an alien world. Upon closer inspection, their arguments invariably fall apart.

I could go on and on with more examples. Debunking the hoax-believers’ claims could fill a book. That’s not surprising, considering several books have been written by them. I have no doubt the books sell well. Conspiracy books always do. I also have no doubt that a book dedicated to debunking them would not sell well. A whole book pointing out the believers’ errors would be tedious, and it isn’t necessary. The examples above are the strongest they can muster, and they fall apart easily when shaken. Their other arguments are even weaker.

But the interesting part is the seeming simplicity of their claims. Not seeing stars in the Apollo pictures is so obvious, so basic a mistake. The other arguments they make seem obvious as well.

But let’s a have small sanity check here. Let’s say NASA knew it couldn’t put men on the Moon, and knew it would lose all its money if it didn’t. They decided to fake the whole lunar project. They built elaborate sets, hired hundreds of technicians, cameramen, scientists knowledgeable enough to fake all this, and eventually spent millions or billions of dollars on the hoax. Eventually, they put together the greatest hoax in all of history, yet they forgot to put stars in the pictures?

There’s more. It has come to light in recent years that the Soviets were well on their way to sending men to the Moon in the 1960s as well. Their missions never got off the ground, but the Soviets worked very hard on them, and of course they were watching carefully when NASA broadcast its own footage. Both superpowers had spent billions of dollars on their respective lunar projects; national prestige was at stake for the two countries that just a few years before were on the verge of nuclear war. You can imagine that if the Soviets had faked their missions and forgotten such obvious flaws as stars in images and shadows that went in the wrong direction, the American press would have savaged them beyond belief. Do the conspiracy theorists honestly think that Tass or Pravda would have done any differently to the American project? It would have been the Soviets’ greatest victory of all time to prove that the Americans had botched their biggest peacetime project in history, yet even they acknowledged the truth of the Moon missions.

In the end, truth and logic prevail. America did send men to the Moon, and it was triumph of human engineering, perseverance, and spirit.

A postscript: after Kaysing finished his book We Never Went to the Moon, he approached Jim Lovell with it. Lovell was the commander of Apollo 13, and literally came close to death trying to save his crew and his ship after an explosion crippled the spacecraft. Lovell’s stake in the space program is almost beyond comprehension.

So you can imagine Lovell’s reaction when he read Kaysing’s book. In the San Jose Metro Weekly magazine (July 25-31, 1996), he is quoted as saying, “The guy [Kaysing] is wacky. His position makes me feel angry. We spent a lot of time getting ready to go to the moon. We spent a lot of money, we took great risks, and it’s something everybody in this country should be proud of.” Kaysing’s reaction to Lovell’s comments? He sued Lovell for libel. In 1997, a judge wisely threw the case out of court. There’s still hope.

18. Worlds in Derision: Velikovsky vs. Modern Science

In 1950, a remarkable book entitled Worlds in Collision was published. It was the culmination of a decade’s work by a man who had a startling thought: what if the various disasters recorded in ancient texts were real, actual events?

The ancients experienced so many catastrophes that it almost sounds like something from a bad science fiction movie. Fire rained down from the sky, the Sun stood still during the day, floods, famines, vermin infestations — it seems like things were a bit more exciting back then. Of course, most people assume that these events were either exaggerated or were simply myths spawned from storytelling and a very human need to explain things that are beyond our understanding. But suppose we take these ancient writers at their word, and assume that these events really did happen. Can there be a simple, common cause? Could it have an astronomical basis?

Psychoanalyst Immanuel Velikovsky decided to tackle this issue. His answers to these seemingly simple questions would have massive repercussions throughout the scientific community, although perhaps not in the way he would have thought. By the time he finished Worlds in Collision and its sequel, Earth in Upheaval, he honestly felt that he had uncovered evidence that all previous scientific laws were wrong, and that we needed to seriously rethink the way the universe worked.

Many people avidly read Worlds in Collision, putting it on the bestseller list soon after it came out. It was a counterculture smash in the 1960s and ’70s. His popularity is waning now, but Velikovsky still has many followers, many of whom fiercely defend his notions.

What are these notions? The basic premise espoused by Velikovsky is that the planet Venus was not formed at the same time as the other planets in our solar system. Instead, he concludes it was formed recently, only a few thousand years ago, around the year 1500 b.c. According to Velikovsky’s analysis of the Bible and other ancient tomes, Venus was originally part of the planet Jupiter, which somehow split apart, ejecting Venus bodily as a huge comet. Over the ensuing several centuries, Venus careened around the solar system, encountering the Earth and Mars multiple times, affecting them profoundly. It was the gravity and electromagnetic effects of these near passes of Venus and Mars as well that caused all the catastrophes heaped upon our ancestors.

As you might guess, I disagree with Velikovsky. I’m not alone; nearly every accredited scientist on the planet disagrees with him as well. There’s good reason for this: Velikovsky was wrong. Really, really wrong. The astronomical events he describes are not so much impossible as they are fantastically impossible — literally, they are fantasy.

To be fair, a lot of accepted scientific theories sound fantastic, too. Who can believe that the universe started as a tiny pinpoint that exploded, creating time and space, which then began to expand, forming the cosmos as we see it now?

What you have to remember is that the Big Bang was first proposed after many astronomical observations were made that could not be explained any other way. There has been a great deal of support for the Big Bang for decades now, and it’s actually one of the most solid ideas in science. On the other hand, Velikovsky’s ideas have little support from astronomical observations, and in fact many fairly well-established astronomical theories directly contradict his ideas. The difference between the Big Bang and Velikovsky’s thesis is physical evidence. The former has lots, the latter has none.

Velikovsky’s thesis certainly seems legitimate. It’s built upon a tremendous amount of historical and archaeological research. The book has a vast number of quotes from all manner of historians, from contemporary analyses to those by the ancient Roman, Pliny the Elder. Experts in the field have