I have not studied this Moon Hoax more than a few days and it is not much I could contribute in a so short time. Usually my goal is to prove beyond any doubt to myself that the official story is false. It is never my goal to find the correct version of what really happened, as that would require deep studies, but conspiracy theoreticians usually have found enough arguments to show the official theory false. Thus, my role is just to check some of those arguments and convince myself. I do not care to convince anybody else, but as I made this blog, I put my reasoning here in case anybody is interested (usually nobody is, especially as I lost my only frequent reader).
In this particular Moon Hoax theory I cannot show beyond all doubt that the official story is false, though it seems that if it is true NASA was very lucky. Yet, as my goal is to get some result, I will try to formulate a possible theory that has the following property:
It is equally or more probable than either the official story of Apollo Moon landings or the Moon Hoax theory that the landings were faked and Apollo missions did not go to the Moon.
Starting from this requirement, the hypothesis is (must be, that is, cannot be anything else) that some Apollo flights did go to the Moon, but as unmanned missions. The crew entered the rocket but left it before the launch and were transported in the landing capsule to some 15,000 m by a B-52 bomber plane and dropped to the sea. Some, but not all, unmanned missions managed to get back. Only a capsule with the crew was shown.
It is not really a compromise between the two views. It just happens to be that one cannot prove the hypothesis is false, just as one cannot prove that either of the main theories is true or false. This alternative hypothesis can explain the following arguments:
1. Photographic evidence:
At least one photo from the Apollo missions is a forgery, AS14-68-9487 the one with shadows that do not converge to a point in the horizon. There are more problems with NASA’s moon photos, for instance:
https://www.aulis.com/apollo_sky.htm
https://www.aulis.com/scientific_analysis.htm
We can conclude that Apollo photos have problems and some must have been forged and some have at least been retouched in a studio. If we take my hypothesis, then these photos were all forged or made in a studio, but NASA had authentic photos sent from the Moon by unmanned missions.
2. Evidence that there are Apollo tracks and remains in the Moon:
There are photos made by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and released in 2013. Some of them show the relains of Apollo landing modules and also tracks:
https://www.space.com/12796-photos-apollo-moon-landing-sites-lro.html
The problem is that NASA made these photos. That is, NASA proves by new photos that older NASA photos were not forgeries. But clearly, assuming that these new photos are not forgeries, there is something on the Moon. In my hypothesis there should be remains of unmanned Apollo missions to the Moon and tracks of Lunar Rovers. It is not impossible that some machine could have made tracks looking like astronaut tracks, in case there is clear evidence that there are astronaut footprints.
3. The youtube video A Funny Thing Happened on The Way to the Moon
This video is at:
It has from 32 min a film made in Apollo 11. This film has been given as evidence that Apollo 11 was on a Low Earth Orbit.
However, it does not prove it. It is possible that Apollo 11 is in 100,000 km from the earth in the video. In that case:
– the phrase “Talk” is from Houston. An analysist is looking at communications from Apollo and notices that there is coming talk communication. It is encoded for the transmission and must be decoded, which at the equipment of that time was not instantaneous, because they had to use a heavy forward error correction code. Thus, he says, we received talk. Then it is decoded and played, so we hear Armstrong’s voice.
– They talk about playback and synchronizing the replies. If they were at 100,000 km from the earth, the signal took 300 ms to travel, but the coding and decoding delays were very different for voice and for high quality video. Thus, video would be shown as playback and voice would have to be synchronized with video later.
- Just to check my argument, the communications solution was Unified S-band, especially developed for Apollo
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_S-band - It modulates voice, video and telemetry all to the same carrier via phase modulation. Telemetry is binary data and uses pseudorandom codewords that take some seconds to correlate (apparently it is Viterbi algorithm or something very similar: both sides know the code words and you match the received code word to your set of code words). Codewords and Viterbi is the most common form of forward error correction (FEC) and took at the processing power of that time just the time this page tells, some seconds. If all communication (voice, video, telemetry) was combined to a single carrier, they could not play voice before correlating telemetry codewords. Probably so, the description on the wiki page is not so clear.
– The image of the earth seems authentic to me, not as anything photographed from 2000 km LEO. That is, the earth radius is 6000 km, from 2000 km you get a very small view and if you cut it with a window, it must be a small window and the image would not show a continent and sea, like it does. So, I do not think they did any window shielding trick.
– They cover windows to stop sunlight from reflecting from the window in the back. That is natural, they would have to do so.
– Thus, this all fits to being at 100,000 km from the earth.
But it is also possible that Apollo 11 is on a low LEO and NASA created fabricated evidence. In that case:
– Then the signal transmission delay, 300 ms, was in reality only 7 ms. That you cannot hear, but the coding/decoding delay is the same and they still would have to play the video in a playback mode and synchronize the video and voice.
– The phrase “Talk”could be a Houston signal analysist saying we got voice communication, like in the first case, but here it could also be from some other communication, as suggested by the video.
– They would not show the real image of the earth, but use a picture of the earth sent earlier by one of the NASA unmanned spaceships, which went to the Moon, or close enough.
– If they were on LEO and Armstrong says they are 100,000 km away, then this video was made either for faking purposes, which means they intended to show it, or for fun, but as the earth looks so small, we can conclude they made some effort. Thus, it was made for faking purposes.
– So, in principle this is also possible. They could have faked it and made this video for faking purposes. The question is why did they not show this video.
There is nothing that shows which of the cases is true, but we can conclude that the Apollo 11 crew is not in some film studio during the times of the flight: the film shows that there is no gravitation in the spaceship, they can move objects in the ear.
Unfortunately we cannot conclude from this that they are in the space. You can remove gravitation in an airplane if the plane is for some time allowed to fall down. Thus, these shots could have been photographed even if the Apollo 11 capsule was inside a B-52 bomber, or dragged by it.
4. The moon stones
At least one of the moon stones, the one Armstrong gave to the king of the Netherlands, is a forgery. I think also the Big Bertha, a large moon stone that has been shown to have come from the Earth, is very odd. Granted, an Earth stone could have been thrown to the Moon when the Moon collided with the Earth 4.5 billion years ago, but it is unlikely that an astronaut would find such a stone from the Moon. Yet, many moon stones seem fine. If some unmanned missions did bring moon stones and the first Apollo 11 did not include a mission to the Moon, this explains the moon stones, both false and true.
5. Apollo Lunar Rover
In the last three missions the astronauts used a vehicle. This vehicle does not seem to fit to the place where it is said to have been. The vehicle assembled itself automatically, though there were astronauts. Astronauts could walk but preferred to drive around in an extremely expensive vehicle. Russians had used a lunar rover earlier, it was a robot. Chinese have used a lunar rover, it also was a robot. A logical conclusion is that Apollo Lunar Rover was a robot and there were no astronauts in those missions. Then there is enough space for the rover and there is a logical need for a rover robot. It would also be very difficult to understand why NASA would have made six trips to the Moon unless they did go to the Moon, possibly as unmanned missions. One fake trip would be enough as propaganda, why would they fake six. Clearly, lots of people worked on a Moon exploration program, therefore the program did explore the Moon. This does not imply that NASA put a man on the Moon, but a robot, probably yes.
6. The remarkable luck of NASA and later loss of knowledge
It is quite remarkable to make six manned missions without causalities. It is much easier if they were not manned and if not all missions managed to get back. This is even more suspicious since NASA did not put radiation shielding to the Apollo Command Modules for passing the Van Allen belts. I cannot understand why NASA would not have studied and solved this very real and known danger, as the solution had been easy: just to distribute the metal more evenly so that the module had about 7 g/cm2 protection everywhere. It probably would not have increased the weight and certainly they could make some walls thicker. Yet, even more remarkable is that NASA lost all original films of the missions, and lost the knowledge how to send safely humans beyond the Van Allen belts, and that Russia and China, and also Israel, seem also seem to lack this knowledge today. I would imagine that at least Israel would have spied it form NASA in the 1970s. It is of course easily explained if Apollo missions going to the Moon were unmanned.
Conclusions
I do not claim that my hypothesis is correct. It demonstrates one point only. The arguments used by Moon Hoaxers cannot show that my hypothesis is incorrect, and the arguments used by Moon landing believers cannot show it either. Unless one of the sides of this controversy can find strong arguments to discard my hypothesis, we must conclude that so far it is the most believable. It explains everything in the easiest way.