
NASA Got Sick of All That Conspiracy Thing and Released Over 10,000 Photos - Gozu
https://www.thevintagenews.com/2015/10/05/so-nasa-got-sick-of-all-that-conspiracy-thing-and-released-over-10000-photos-from-the-apollo-moon-mission/
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carapace
tl;dr:
[https://www.flickr.com/photos/projectapolloarchive/](https://www.flickr.com/photos/projectapolloarchive/)

In re: the "hoax": We have been to the Moon. There is a mirror up there that
you can bounce a laser off of, so anyone who doubts that we've been to the
Moon is ignorant (or an idiot.)

I find it plausible that we _also faked it_.

Think about it. The mission was to beat the Russians.

Picture a smoke-filled conference room at JPL, it's late, past midnight. The
engineers are huddled, trying to figure out how the heck they're gonna make it
up there without some disaster or mishap. Then the guy in the back, the one
smoking his pipe, says quietly, "Say fellas..." Before you know it, they're on
the phone to Stanley Kubrick, and the rest _isn 't_ history.

~~~
eesmith
The Soviets had radio telescopes and their probes on the Moon had already sent
back pictures. They surely had the ability to listen to US transmissions from
the Moon.

Remember, Larry Baysinger, a ham in Kentucky, was able to receive and record
some of the VHF communications. The Soviets were surely able to do better.

If the US had faked the landing, don't you think the Soviets would have
pounced on the chance of exposing an American lie?

[http://www.moonhoaxdebunked.com/](http://www.moonhoaxdebunked.com/) goes into
many of the reason for how it isn't plausible that the US faked it. I'll pick
a few I like. 1) how did Apollo 11 return 21.55 kg of Moon rocks without
people? 2) how are the long scenes of low-gee walking done on Earth? 3) how
were the fakers of the 1960s able to produce multi-hour single-shot scenes and
photographs which hold up to decades of scrutiny, including matching modern
high-resolution topological data of the Moon gathered by non-US space probes?
4) how did they fake video of moondust falling at 1/6th gee in a vacuum?

~~~
carapace
I'm saying (suggesting really) that we did go to the moon (duh!) and _we also
faked it_ , just in case something went wrong with the real mission.

~~~
eesmith
And I'm saying that no one would have faked it, even as a backup, because it
would have been so easily discovered had it been tried, and with huge
political downsides.

Even as a reserve, where was the budget hidden? how many people would be
needed? are they the same as the real staff, or is there an entirely new cast
sworn to secrecy? In the latter, if the option were used, how do you explain
all of the new voices and people? In either case, how many rehearsals would be
needed to be ready, just in case this backup plan was needed?

How do you convince, say, the Australian staff of the dish at Parkes that they
were receiving a "real" signal ... or would they have been in on the secret at
the last minute?

What do you say when the project boss asks "how do we keep the Soviets from
finding out?"

What's the odds that the Soviets have no spies, agents, or sympathizers who
would find out? Even if they did find out and decided to keep it secret
anyway, how did that secret survive past the collapse of the Soviet Union?

There's nothing about the " _also faked it_ " proposal which makes any sense,
politically or technically.

~~~
carapace
I'm not a conspiracy nit (for _that_ conspiracy anyhow) so I'm not going to
try to answer those very good objections. I have _no idea_ how it might have
actually worked, if at all.

Really, my point is that there is a third option, a "gripping hand", between
the true-believer in the hoax and the true-believer in the no-hoax world
views.

I can't begin to tell you what might have made sense to whom, but uh...

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potemkin_village](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potemkin_village)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Project](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Project)

Maybe it was a Potemkin Manhattan? ;-)

~~~
eesmith
There is a fourth - you are in a constructed bubble like the movie Truman and
none of this history actually happened.

And a fifth - the backup plan was to use alien technology on loan from the Men
in Black so we it would appear we went to the Moon ourselves.

Really, once you start with hoaxes you need to figure out which hoax to
triangulate. Why single out the "it was all a movie stage" hoax?

What is your point about the two links? Quoting from the first link: "Modern
historians are divided on the degree of truth behind the Potemkin village
story, and some writers argue that the story is an exaggeration. According to
Simon Sebag-Montefiore ... the tale ... is largely fictional.[3] Aleksandr
Panchenko ... conclude[s] that the Potemkin villages are a myth."

I think from your last links you mean to imply the assertion that the nuclear
bomb project was a well-kept secret.

This isn't true.

Quoting from the second link: "By early 1943 newspapers began publishing
reports of large construction in Tennessee and Washington based on public
records, and the office began discussing with the project how to maintain
secrecy."

Also, The Atlantic has an article titled "The Time a Cleveland Newspaper
Divulged the Manhattan Project". It start "Before Woodward and Bernstein,
before Glenn Greenwald, there was John W. Raper, a columnist for the Cleveland
Press, who stumbled across something very odd while on vacation in New
Mexico." \-
[https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/09/the-t...](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/09/the-
time-a-cleveland-newspaper-divulged-the-manhattan-project/279873/) .

And of course the British and Soviets knew about it.

In any case, enough information leaked out that less than 25 years later
"three newly graduated physics students were given the task of developing a
detailed weapon design using only public domain information. The project
reached a successful conclusion, that is, they did develop a viable design
(detailed in the classified report UCRL-50248) after expending only three man-
years of effort over two and a half calendar years." \-
[http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Nwfaq/Nfaq4.html](http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Nwfaq/Nfaq4.html)
.
[http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Nwfaq/Nfaq4.html](http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Nwfaq/Nfaq4.html)
and [http://io9.gizmodo.com/this-experiment-proved-that-anyone-
co...](http://io9.gizmodo.com/this-experiment-proved-that-anyone-could-design-
a-nucle-510618426) .

If the US couldn't keep the nuclear bomb design a secret, how would anyone
high-up in government think that plans for a faked moon landing could be keep
secret?

Here's another example you could have listed - the secret war in Laos and
Cambodia, with bombings from 1964 to 1973.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Menu](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Menu)
. That secret lasted for about 10 years, though declassification in 2000 shows
that many things were still secret 25 years later.

~~~
carapace
Well, yes, except it wasn't alien technology it was old nazi UFOs.

You don't expect me to provide evidence of a secret program that _stayed
secret_ do you? Because if so, you've got me.

Here's my current favorite:
[http://www.doctormarysmonkey.com/index.htm](http://www.doctormarysmonkey.com/index.htm)

> How the unsolved murder of a doctor, a secret laboratory in New Orleans and
> cancer-causing monkey viruses are linked to Lee Harvey Oswald, the JFK
> assassination and emerging global epidemics.

(My point is not that any one specific weird thing happened, but that _some
weird things_ did.)

