TheWorldJournal.com

The Fake Moon Landing?
By Jean-Francois Numainville, TheWorldJournal.com

After President Kennedy launched in 1961 the project to land a man on the surface of the moon, and to bring him safely back to Earth by the end of this decade, followed one of the most passionate duel in mankind history. Indeed, Russians and Americans were eagerly decided to be the first to conquer the moon and huge financial and human efforts were put in this objective on both sides. As we know, America won the race, and timeless images are now left as memorials of this glorious past: Neil Armstrong's firsts steps on the moon surface, the moon rover and one amazing golf game. But now, a few persons are questioning the legitimacy of those images and are exposing what they call evidence of fraud in the composition of the footage from the NASA. Could the Americans be so scared of losing it to the Russians that they faked the moon exploration?

A recent television show, "Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon?" brought the limelight back on some irregularities that could prove that nobody ever landed on the moon: pictures taken from the surface of the moon did not show any stars. Also, how can the flag planted on the surface appear to be waving in the air? Were the rocks brought back from the moon just fragments from an asteroid that landed on earth? Let's take a look at those facts and see if they can pass the test.

Firstly, the missing stars from the moon surface pictures can be explained by a simple fact: when you are trying to include something very bright and very dim in the same picture, it is likely that the less bright parts of the photo will not appear. This is the case of the pictures from the moon, and if you ever took a picture in a room with a window at night, I bet you there were no stars in the sky either. And what about the flag that was planted in the moon surface that was waving as if it were blown by a mysterious breeze? Of course, we all know that there is no such thing as oxygen on the moon. But the weaving motion of the flag is due to the astronauts that planted it. When they twisted the flagpole so that it penetrated the moon dust, they inducted a motion in the flag. Unlike Earth, there is no or very little force (like air or gravity) to slow down and eventually stop this movement; the flag kept on weaving just like the ones on Earth, marking a symbolic moment in the age of space exploration.

Finally, the moon rocks that were picked up by astronauts should be the strongest evidence of the success of the moon missions. They have all kinds of special aspects that no earthly rocks have, this fact has been confirm by scientists throughout the world. Those who are pretending that they were no moon landings are not arguing this fact; they are rather pretending that all of the moon rocks are small pieces of an asteroid that landed on earth, explaining the strange patterns of the rocks. Independent scientists have refuted this theory because the rocks brought back were is such abundant quantity (841 pounds) that an asteroid this size would not have collided Earth without behind spotted by researchers around the world, thus no such secret asteroid could have been presented as moon rocks without a great deal of suspicions from the scientific community.

So there you have it. It seems that pretty much all that the skeptics of the Apollo projects were saying was wrong after all. Next time you see a show like "Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon?" - be careful, and don't believe everything they say because it is on television. But being skeptic is something that is essential to a modern society where a lot of people have interests to make you believe all kinds of things. It is just a matter of finding where there is really something to be worry about, and where things are just the way they appear.

© January 22, 2002