Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2001/02/16
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]LUGgers, Last night I watched a "documentary" on FOX with a curious title along the lines of "Conspiracy Theory: Was the Moon Landing a Hoax?". Now, being on FOX, the "documentary" was of course sensationalized and more than slightly dubious. Having said that, there was lots of stuff that blew my mind. From footage of Neil Armstrong ejecting himself from a practice LEM landing on earth just seconds before he lost control and it crashed and exploded, to theories about the effects of travelling through radiation in the Van Allen Belt, to the high mortality rate of astronauts in freakish earthly accidents, to Gus Grissom's family insisting that he was silenced (read: killed) on Apollo 1 because he was ready to expose NASA and government lies. I was taking it all with a grain of salt until a long sequence about the photographic evidence made me sit upright. Did anybody else watch this??? I wished I'd taped the thing. There was so much startling info, it was disturbing. Whether the moon landing was a hoax is something I'm not ready to pass judgment, but call me naive, they did a fairly convincing job of making many of the moon landing pics look rigged. There was a movie sequence of the LEM at the side of the frame stationary while the astronauts were bouncing around. Then more shots of the astronauts collecting moon rocks, supposedly on the exact same mission but 2-1/2 miles away from the LEM. In this footage, there is no LEM. Shockingly, the image -- from rocks scattered in the foreground to terrain in the background -- is exactly the same setting, framed the same, tripod obviously in the same fixed position. They overlapped the images, and it was a precise match. What are the chances of that? Or, where'd the LEM disappear?? It looked like a stage and backdrop. More questions: Where are the crater blasts from getting off the moon? They can't account for a single crater blast on any of the six landings. And, how did those American Flags wave in the breezes of the moon, backward and forward? They're waving around like there's a sea breeze. They showed the typical movies of astronauts and vehicles bouncing around like there was no gravity. They then sped them up at precisely double-speed, and the movements looked naturally earthly -- real time, real gravity, with dust flying around and falling like we'd expect to see on earth. Then there's the pix of the astronauts themselves, climbing down the stairs and standing in dark shadow of the landing craft. The shadow detail is wonderful -- it's also impossible without the aid of a fill light. There were also several shots showing shadows of the craft and rocks going in one direction from the sun (the key light), and yet astronauts had shadows going in different directions. NASA said no flash, strobes or other light sources were used. The camera manufacturer Hassleblad says the same thing. In some shots, the astronauts are backlit but you can clearly read what's on their uniforms, when in actuality this should be black and in deep silhouette. Curious... More curious was the assessment of the designer of the still photography cameras from Hassleblad (can't recall his name). He claims that the colour stills are all perfectly framed, exposed and in focus, and insists that the astronauts suits were so bulky that they prohibited even looking through the viewfinders, let alone focussing the camera. The cameras were positioned at their belts and aimed blindly. He doubts that so many perfectly composed, focused and exposed photos could have been taken like this. One by accident, maybe, but not a whole portfolio. Then there's the dirty business of the cross-hairs. Hassleblad designed the cameras to NASA specs so that a grid of crosshairs would appear in the foreground of every photo. On many of the photos, the images were obviously tampered with, because parts of the crosshairs disappear *behind* objects. The Hassleblad designer says there's no plausible explanation beyond tampering with the film. The stuff was so dumbfounding, it made me begin to think the documentary itself was a big hoax. (To say nothing of the satellite pics of Area 51. There's a big region there with craters. They got one image of a big deep crater from Area 51 and transposed it over a crater pic from a moon landing. Another perfect fit...) Has anybody heard any good plausible explanations for the photographic evidence? Any books someone might recommend?? Dave