Posted by
michael
on from the things-THEY-don't-want-you-to-know dept.
redbaron7 writes "The BBC is
reporting that NASA has cancelled plans for a book to challenge the Moon Hoax Conspiracy Theory, due to criticism. No doubt the cancellation of this book will be listed as further "evidence" that the landings were fake."
Perception is reality.
by
nege
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
NASA is darned if they do and darned if they dont where those conspiracies are concerned. If people *want* to believe something, nothing they say or do can prove otherwise.
Re:Perception is reality.
by
Xerithane
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
NASA is darned if they do and darned if they dont where those conspiracies are concerned. If people *want* to believe something, nothing they say or do can prove otherwise.
You are exactly right. I worked at a NASA base 5 years ago, it was nothing spooky or mysterious. They have some cool technology, but that's all it is.
Yet it doesn't stop conversations like this, that I had with some strange fellow in a small town in southern California:
Me: Well, actually NASA is just like any other organization. You go to work, work on a project that is usually pretty cool and exciting, and go home to a normal house.. It's not like you work for NASA and suddenly they relocate you to some secret underground housing project. Him: NASA hides all of it's findings! You never know the result of their research because it would disrupt humanity! Me: What research? Most of NASA research is funded in part by public companies, and you can easily find out what they are doing. Most projects have their own website. Him: They hide a lot of stuff. Art Bell deserves to know the truth and tell the American people what's going on!
Art fucking Bell. That what these people listen to. At that point, I just walked off. They want there to be some secret meaning, because it gives their life more significant and importance in their mind. They're part of the elite conspiracy busting consortium without having to lift a finger just open their mouths.
As long as Art Bell is around to tell them the "secrets" NASA is holding out, NASA will have to deal with the nutjobs. It's unfortunate.
Re:Perception is reality.
by
Daniel+Dvorkin
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Um, I don't think you read my post very carefully.
---
You: People who think Palladium is evil because it's from Microsoft are just like people who think NASA faked the Moon landings.
Me: No, people who think Palladium is evil because it's from Microsoft are just like people who think the Soviet space agency was lying when it denied that its personnel were getting killed.
You: That proves my point!
---
You may not understand the context here. NASA has a lot of flaws, but lying about its missions isn't one of them; every time there's a failure (whether or not loss of life is involved) it's dissected in gory detail, in public. OTOH, the Soviet space program was under no more obligation than the rest of the Soviet government to reveal its fuckups, and (as we now know) they did suffer a number of rather horrific accidents that make the Challenger disaster look like small potatoes. This was something that everyone kind of suspected all along, but we had to wait until the end of the Cold War for our suspicions to be confirmed. The Soviets didn't help their own case at all with pre-emptive press releases that said, in essence, "That big boom at Baikonur that your satellites picked up, that was just, um... a problem with a test of a new engine, that's right! No dead cosmonauts and ground crew here, nosirree. Nothing to see, move along, move along..."
So the point is (in case you still haven't gotten it) that Microsoft has a history of lying too. They lie about their intentions, they lie about standards compliance, they lie about openness. They try to control every new technology that comes along, and if they can't control it, they try to crush it. This behavior is a matter of public record. So when people who pay attention to this history express some suspicion of Palladium, we're being entirely reasonable -- just as those who expressed suspicion about the safety record of the Soviet space program were being entirely reasonable. Those who believe NASA faked the Moon landings, OTOH, have no reasonable grounds for their suspicions.
Do you get it now? Jesus, I can't believe I wasted that much time in explaining this to someone who probably isn't going to get it anyway...
-- The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Not really canceled
by
Ghoser777
·
· Score: 5, Informative
And if you actually read the article, you would have realized that Jim Oberg is still going to write the book, but with alternative funding.
F-bacher
-- James Tiberius Kirk: "Spock, the women on your planet are logical. No other planet in the galaxy can make that claim."
Proof of the Moon hoax
by
Mr.+Eradicator
·
· Score: 5, Informative
I really wish NASA would get back doing what they do best....it would be much cooler to watch man walk on Mars and then hear about how *that* was faked.
Re:I KNEW IT!!!
by
DaveAtFraud
·
· Score: 5, Funny
Elvis, I told you to keep quiet. Now get back to Graceland before somebody notices that you're not dead. If you're good, we'll borrow one of the black helicopters and slip down to Dallas and catch some rays on the grassy knoll right after I get back from my next trip to Area 51. Who knows, we might even see the woman in the red dress again.
-- They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
Re:Why don't they...
by
foistboinder
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
...just use the freekin' Hubble to take pictures of the landing sites and shut these idiots up?
There has to be enough resolution
The reflected light from the moon is strong enough to fry Hubble's optics.
If the moon landings were a hoax, don't you think the Soviet Union would have exposed it for propaganda purposes (they were able to track the spacecraft, IIRC) ?
My point being...
by
MacAndrew
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
...there is absolutely NO chance of winning with the conspiracy crowd. They have everything to lose by conceding. (And I was pretending to be one of them. I'm not! Really!)
However, a book aimed at the general public might make sense -- there is a lot of bad science out there in general acceptance. A book targeting these problems, and not framed as a response to the conspiracy theorists, might make a lot of sense.
For all the fun folks make of conspiracy theorists, the term itself is a condemnation of skeptics run amok. I like the undercurrent of skepticism, of criticizing the accepted wisdom, but not with the disregard of the facts and, worse, dishonest hidden agenda of getting rich or getting on TV.
Which is the more complex and unlikely scenario: the Apollo program occured as "conventional wisdom" says it does, or the whole thing was faked with thousands upon thousnads of people involved, fake unmanned space craft travelling from Earth orbit to lunar orbit replying to radio chatter from Earth, fake moon rocks good enough to fool the best geologists around the world etc. etc.
Given the technology of the day it would be HARDER to fake the landings then to do it for real, not to mention the huge numbers of people involved staying quiet.
True skeptics don't automaticaly beleive everything they are told, but they are also able to logicaly analyze the evidence before them. No skeptic would beleive that the moon landings were faked.
Should take inspiration from Hitchhikers Guide
by
binaryDigit
·
· Score: 5, Funny
Take all the people who don't believe, stick them on a spaceship and let them see the landing sites for themselves. We can tell them to "press the big red button" when they are satisfied and are ready to come back home;)
The truth is obvious.
by
Prince_Ali
·
· Score: 5, Funny
Not only was the moon landing fake, but also the Space Race and Cold War. The US and Russia have been faking all space exploration. Sputnik I was the only real space launch. It was during this mission that Russia learned that the world sat upon the back of a turtle. The turtle in turn sat upon another. In fact Turtle(n) sat upon Turtle(n+1) into infinity. They shared this info with the US. It was then decided that the general public could not handle this information, and that is why the "Space Race" started to really heat up after Sputnik I. It was all a hoax so that no one would suspect the truth.
Can the Hubble Space Telescope take a picture that shows the Apollo lunar modules on the moon? With its 2.4 diameter mirror, the smallest object that the Hubble can resolve at the Moon's distance of about 400,000 kilometers is about 80 meters across.
Besides, why would anyone who believed in that naive hoax suddenly believe a so-called Hubble picture?
-- I believe posters are recognized by their sig. So I made one.
Ever notice that "conspiracy theorists"...
by
JThaddeus
·
· Score: 5, Funny
... think the government can't do anything right except cover up whatever pet project they think was faked or hidden?
-- "Love is a familiar; Love is a devil: there is no evil angel but Love." --William Shakespeare ('Love's Labors Lost')
The lego links to which you refer are sprinkled throughout this page. Some of the claims of the non-believers really are quite funny and far fetched.
By the way, for all those who were dissappointed that NASA is no longer making the book, the guy that runs the site link above appears to have his own book for sale. It's probably a rough equivalent.
Re:Why don't they...
by
Sc00ter
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Send rocket to the moon with critics and bring them back. A month after they've returned and saying how great it really was and that they were wrong to question the original moon shot, leak a fake video of them on a moon set. Now the conspiracy nuts can't trust each other....
Re:Why don't they...
by
Idarubicin
·
· Score: 5, Informative
First reason:
It's a waste of Hubble time. There's real science to be done.
Second reason:
The sunlit moon is way too bright. You'd cook all the expensive and highly sensitive optics. If you examine a new moon, maybe you could get away with it, but such a moon is still illuminated by the full sunny side of the earth. I wouldn't want to try it. Also, pointing towards the dark face of the moon is also pointing the Hubble very close to where the sun would be in its sky...
Third reason:
The Hubble's resolution isn't good enough. Depending on the wavelength you work at, the moon's distance at the time, and the assumptions you choose to make in your calculation, the Hubble could resolve objects no smaller than twenty to eighty metres in size--much larger than any of the artifacts left at the moon landing sites. You might have better luck with the Keck telescopes in Hawaii, but they too are busy being used for real science. Any hoax believers aren't going to be convinced by a smudge, which is all you'd see even with the Kecks--if you could see anything at all.
-- ~Idarubicin
Re:Does it really matter anymore?
by
azadrozny
·
· Score: 5, Funny
We have a space station orbiting the earth
But do we really?!? Have you ever been to this so called "space station"? I though not. That object you see in your telescope is really just a big piece of aluminum foil. It's a giant conspiracy to hide the fact that Russia squandered all of its funds for the ISS on super computers that search the Net for p0rn.:-)
To convince the conspiracy theorists, NASA only needs to give them a better theory.
The moon landing was real alright - they released faked photos and such because they actually established a nuclear missile base on the moon, in complete violation of international treaties.
But a few very perceptive people noticed some small discrepancies, so it was necessary to "guide" them into believing the moon shots were faked, so they would be dismissed as kooks.
Work this right, and we might get financing for some more trips to the moon, well equipped for an extended search for the hidden automated missile bases.
We just don't want anyone going up there and bothering the monolith. It tells us it doesn't like it when the ape-people keep touching it. Monoliths are very fickle things...
-- You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Favorite piece of evidence
by
fleshapple
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
The moon landing is a great example of separate intersecting lines of evidence converging on the conclusion that we did indeed land on the moon. For the conspiracy theorists, no amount of evidence is going to convince them so we might as well be speaking another language. Still, I think interesting things can come out of the discussion. My favorite piece of evidence of the landing is the storage bag from the Apollo 15 mission. NASA astronauts threw it out, it ended up at auction, someone bought it and realized that it was saturated with moon dust (you can tell the dust is from the moon by comparing the ratios of certain isotopes). The isotopic ratios of certain elements in moon rocks is different than that of any rocks found on earth. The collector has since been selling sections at an enormous profit.
see this link
Now, I suppose they could have gone to the moon with an unmanned mission which landed, blasted off, returned with a bunch of rocks and dust which was subsequently distributed. At that point, why not just go there. Occam's Razor would say manned missions is a much more likely solution given the other evidence.
false authority syndrome (completely off topic)
by
Theodore+Logan
·
· Score: 5, Funny
What do you mean it's your favorite anti-hoax site so far? Do you know so many you actually have to rank them and pick favorites? Do you spend much of your time looking for new ones?
Don't pretend to be someone you're not. Nobody's impressed anyway (in this case, all it goes to show is that you have some weird priorities).
--
"If you think education is expensive, try ignorance" - Derek Bok
The International Society to Disprove the Moon Landings (ISDML) had recently determined that Christopher Columbus had never set foot in North America, and that any evidence presented by the Imperial Spanish Court of Ferdinand and Isabela was indeed a hoax.
There is no proof that Columbus, nor any of the men in his three vessels, had ever crossed the Atlantic and landed in North America. The ISDML believe that any evidence to the contrary was generated as part of an elaborate hoax orchestrated by the Spanish Government in an attempt to convince the world that they were the winners in the "Sea Race" versus their rival nation, Portugal. All evidence was fabricated at an elaboratly constructed studio in Seville, in a blatent attempt to deceive the public.
In fact, the ISDML has failed to find evidence that Europeans have ever reached North America, nor that this 'fabeled' contined does indeed exists.
More information will be fortcomming.
The best challenge to conspiracy theorists
by
Joey7F
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
The apollo mission was followed by amateur astronomers (and professional ones outside of the USA). It just so happens that all of them were in on it too?
Conspiracy theorists often get nicked by the sharpened edges Occam's Razor.
--Joey
Re:From someone who used to think it was real...
by
Yunzil
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
For me, the most convincing "evidence" supportng the conspiracy theory is the radiation belt, and NASA's inability (even at present IIRC) to send any living thing through it without receiving a lethal dose
The van Allen belts are regions above the Earth's surface where the Earth's magnetic field has trapped particles of the solar wind. An unprotected man would indeed get a lethal dose of radiation, if he stayed there long enough. Actually, the spaceship traveled through the belts pretty quickly, getting past them in an hour or so. There simply wasn't enough time to get a lethal dose, and, as a matter of fact, the metal hull of the spaceship did indeed block most of the radiation.
Not Entirely True
by
FreeUser
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
People who think the moon landings were a hoax are never going to be convinced otherwise by anything anyone says, NASA or otherwise.
Not entirely true.
I have a friend who is pretty intelligent, but has an unfortunate weakness in being gullible to certain "newsoid" broadcasts. Its very odd... the guy actually is quite smart, but after seeing the Fox News special claiming the moon landings were fake he was mostly convinced, and accussed me of being closed minded and dense when I laughed at him.
So I did a little googling (something he should have done before ever admitting to anyone other than his wife, who is similarly a little "too open minded" about fringe conspiracy theories, that he took such a thing seriously) and pointed him to an excellent site debunking the entire broadcast point by point, with clay models and lighting to demonstrate the optical features of each "faked" shot.
In other words, I pointed him to a web site that proved, picture by picture, that every piece of "evidence" presented by the media whores of Fox was in fact farcical, and that the reporter should have been emberrassed at his own lack of basic scientific understanding on each and every point.
My friend, somewhat abashed, was convinced, and was more than a little annoyed that a major television network would present such garbage as "news."
Frankly, so am I, but the point remains... there are a lot of reasonable people who have an unfortuante, ingrained trust of the media (many of the same people will decry the media, but believe the next newscast all the same), and these people can and often are conviced by reasonable, factually, easy-to-understand counterarguments.
Indeed, fighting bad speech with good speech is the best way to offset this sort of thing.
That, and openly jeering at the Fox Media Whores perpetrating this disgusting fraud on the people of America whenever they show their faces in public (a little social humiliation is just what those clowns need. No, let me rephrease: a great deal of social humiliation is just what those clowns need).
I worked at NASA for four years... you can't win
by
Dr.+Zowie
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
...against the tinfoil hat people.
I operated an instrument aboard the SOHO spacecraft for four years; during that time I fielded innumerable emails and discussions from crackpots who were convinced, variously, that comets were crashing into the Earth, that aliens were here, that SOHO was in fact a spy satellite, and that the sun was going to blow up.
The common thread was that NASA must be hiding something. In particular, writing from a nascom.nasa.gov email address, I was an "insider" and therefore not to be trusted -- if you're involved with NASA, these people will latch on to anything you say that seems to support them, but dismiss even the clearest, most well-documented rebuttals. After all, you're working for the government, of course you'd say that.:-P
Give me a break! Those people at Goddard were working their arses off just to keep the damned spacecraft working and the data flowing -- there was no time (or inclination or, most probably ability) to keep a giant dark secret about aliens or whatever.
Ditto the lunar journeys. Feh.
The Russians are, collectively, the best reason not to believe the Apollo revisionists -- if we really didn't send men on those spacecraft, the Russians had the technology to find out. They would've screamed bloody murder. Besides, why bother to fake Apollo 13?
Slashdot Mirror
NASA is darned if they do and darned if they dont where those conspiracies are concerned. If people *want* to believe something, nothing they say or do can prove otherwise.
And if you actually read the article, you would have realized that Jim Oberg is still going to write the book, but with alternative funding.
F-bacher
James Tiberius Kirk: "Spock, the women on your planet are logical. No other planet in the galaxy can make that claim."
This site is my favorite anti-hoax site so far.
That's Mr. Eradicator to you.
trance-port
I really wish NASA would get back doing what they do best....it would be much cooler to watch man walk on Mars and then hear about how *that* was faked.
Elvis, I told you to keep quiet. Now get back to Graceland before somebody notices that you're not dead. If you're good, we'll borrow one of the black helicopters and slip down to Dallas and catch some rays on the grassy knoll right after I get back from my next trip to Area 51. Who knows, we might even see the woman in the red dress again.
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
The reflected light from the moon is strong enough to fry Hubble's optics.
If the moon landings were a hoax, don't you think the Soviet Union would have exposed it for propaganda purposes (they were able to track the spacecraft, IIRC) ?
Yet Another Web Site
...there is absolutely NO chance of winning with the conspiracy crowd. They have everything to lose by conceding. (And I was pretending to be one of them. I'm not! Really!)
However, a book aimed at the general public might make sense -- there is a lot of bad science out there in general acceptance. A book targeting these problems, and not framed as a response to the conspiracy theorists, might make a lot of sense.
For all the fun folks make of conspiracy theorists, the term itself is a condemnation of skeptics run amok. I like the undercurrent of skepticism, of criticizing the accepted wisdom, but not with the disregard of the facts and, worse, dishonest hidden agenda of getting rich or getting on TV.
Take all the people who don't believe, stick them on a spaceship and let them see the landing sites for themselves. We can tell them to "press the big red button" when they are satisfied and are ready to come back home ;)
Not only was the moon landing fake, but also the Space Race and Cold War. The US and Russia have been faking all space exploration. Sputnik I was the only real space launch. It was during this mission that Russia learned that the world sat upon the back of a turtle. The turtle in turn sat upon another. In fact Turtle(n) sat upon Turtle(n+1) into infinity. They shared this info with the US. It was then decided that the general public could not handle this information, and that is why the "Space Race" started to really heat up after Sputnik I. It was all a hoax so that no one would suspect the truth.
Slashdotter are stupid and biased.
Let's score a Informative...
Why don't they just use the freekin' Hubble to take pictures of the landing sites and shut these idiots up?
As explained on this Astronomy Picture of the Day:
Besides, why would anyone who believed in that naive hoax suddenly believe a so-called Hubble picture?
I believe posters are recognized by their sig. So I made one.
... think the government can't do anything right except cover up whatever pet project they think was faked or hidden?
"Love is a familiar; Love is a devil: there is no evil angel but Love." --William Shakespeare ('Love's Labors Lost')
The lego links to which you refer are sprinkled throughout this page. Some of the claims of the non-believers really are quite funny and far fetched.
By the way, for all those who were dissappointed that NASA is no longer making the book, the guy that runs the site link above appears to have his own book for sale. It's probably a rough equivalent.
http://www.faqs.org/faqs/astronomy/faq/part2/secti on-22.html s .html
http://sm3a.gsfc.nasa.gov/messages/676.html
http://www.redzero.demon.co.uk/moonhoax/telescope
Just to name a few.
Free Mac Mini
Send rocket to the moon with critics and bring them back. A month after they've returned and saying how great it really was and that they were wrong to question the original moon shot, leak a fake video of them on a moon set.
Now the conspiracy nuts can't trust each other....
III.IIVIVIXIIVIVIIIVVIIIIXVIIIXIIIIIIIIVIIIIVVIII
It's a waste of Hubble time. There's real science to be done.
Second reason:
The sunlit moon is way too bright. You'd cook all the expensive and highly sensitive optics. If you examine a new moon, maybe you could get away with it, but such a moon is still illuminated by the full sunny side of the earth. I wouldn't want to try it. Also, pointing towards the dark face of the moon is also pointing the Hubble very close to where the sun would be in its sky...
Third reason:
The Hubble's resolution isn't good enough. Depending on the wavelength you work at, the moon's distance at the time, and the assumptions you choose to make in your calculation, the Hubble could resolve objects no smaller than twenty to eighty metres in size--much larger than any of the artifacts left at the moon landing sites. You might have better luck with the Keck telescopes in Hawaii, but they too are busy being used for real science. Any hoax believers aren't going to be convinced by a smudge, which is all you'd see even with the Kecks--if you could see anything at all.
~Idarubicin
But do we really?!? Have you ever been to this so called "space station"? I though not. That object you see in your telescope is really just a big piece of aluminum foil. It's a giant conspiracy to hide the fact that Russia squandered all of its funds for the ISS on super computers that search the Net for p0rn. :-)
To convince the conspiracy theorists, NASA only needs to give them a better theory.
The moon landing was real alright - they released faked photos and such because they actually established a nuclear missile base on the moon, in complete violation of international treaties.
But a few very perceptive people noticed some small discrepancies, so it was necessary to "guide" them into believing the moon shots were faked, so they would be dismissed as kooks.
Work this right, and we might get financing for some more trips to the moon, well equipped for an extended search for the hidden automated missile bases.
It wasn't a fake...
We just don't want anyone going up there and bothering the monolith. It tells us it doesn't like it when the ape-people keep touching it. Monoliths are very fickle things...
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
The moon landing is a great example of separate intersecting lines of evidence converging on the conclusion that we did indeed land on the moon. For the conspiracy theorists, no amount of evidence is going to convince them so we might as well be speaking another language. Still, I think interesting things can come out of the discussion. My favorite piece of evidence of the landing is the storage bag from the Apollo 15 mission. NASA astronauts threw it out, it ended up at auction, someone bought it and realized that it was saturated with moon dust (you can tell the dust is from the moon by comparing the ratios of certain isotopes). The isotopic ratios of certain elements in moon rocks is different than that of any rocks found on earth. The collector has since been selling sections at an enormous profit. see this link Now, I suppose they could have gone to the moon with an unmanned mission which landed, blasted off, returned with a bunch of rocks and dust which was subsequently distributed. At that point, why not just go there. Occam's Razor would say manned missions is a much more likely solution given the other evidence.
What do you mean it's your favorite anti-hoax site so far? Do you know so many you actually have to rank them and pick favorites? Do you spend much of your time looking for new ones?
Don't pretend to be someone you're not. Nobody's impressed anyway (in this case, all it goes to show is that you have some weird priorities).
"If you think education is expensive, try ignorance" - Derek Bok
For immediate release:
The International Society to Disprove the Moon Landings (ISDML) had recently determined that Christopher Columbus had never set foot in North America, and that any evidence presented by the Imperial Spanish Court of Ferdinand and Isabela was indeed a hoax.
There is no proof that Columbus, nor any of the men in his three vessels, had ever crossed the Atlantic and landed in North America. The ISDML believe that any evidence to the contrary was generated as part of an elaborate hoax orchestrated by the Spanish Government in an attempt to convince the world that they were the winners in the "Sea Race" versus their rival nation, Portugal. All evidence was fabricated at an elaboratly constructed studio in Seville, in a blatent attempt to deceive the public.
In fact, the ISDML has failed to find evidence that Europeans have ever reached North America, nor that this 'fabeled' contined does indeed exists.
More information will be fortcomming.
The apollo mission was followed by amateur astronomers (and professional ones outside of the USA). It just so happens that all of them were in on it too?
Conspiracy theorists often get nicked by the sharpened edges Occam's Razor.
--Joey
Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.
Copied from the Bad Astronomy site:
People who think the moon landings were a hoax are never going to be convinced otherwise by anything anyone says, NASA or otherwise.
... the guy actually is quite smart, but after seeing the Fox News special claiming the moon landings were fake he was mostly convinced, and accussed me of being closed minded and dense when I laughed at him.
... there are a lot of reasonable people who have an unfortuante, ingrained trust of the media (many of the same people will decry the media, but believe the next newscast all the same), and these people can and often are conviced by reasonable, factually, easy-to-understand counterarguments.
Not entirely true.
I have a friend who is pretty intelligent, but has an unfortunate weakness in being gullible to certain "newsoid" broadcasts. Its very odd
So I did a little googling (something he should have done before ever admitting to anyone other than his wife, who is similarly a little "too open minded" about fringe conspiracy theories, that he took such a thing seriously) and pointed him to an excellent site debunking the entire broadcast point by point, with clay models and lighting to demonstrate the optical features of each "faked" shot.
In other words, I pointed him to a web site that proved, picture by picture, that every piece of "evidence" presented by the media whores of Fox was in fact farcical, and that the reporter should have been emberrassed at his own lack of basic scientific understanding on each and every point.
My friend, somewhat abashed, was convinced, and was more than a little annoyed that a major television network would present such garbage as "news."
Frankly, so am I, but the point remains
Indeed, fighting bad speech with good speech is the best way to offset this sort of thing.
That, and openly jeering at the Fox Media Whores perpetrating this disgusting fraud on the people of America whenever they show their faces in public (a little social humiliation is just what those clowns need. No, let me rephrease: a great deal of social humiliation is just what those clowns need).
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
I operated an instrument aboard the SOHO spacecraft for four years; during that time I fielded innumerable emails and discussions from crackpots who were convinced, variously, that comets were crashing into the Earth, that aliens were here, that SOHO was in fact a spy satellite, and that the sun was going to blow up.
The common thread was that NASA must be hiding something. In particular, writing from a nascom.nasa.gov email address, I was an "insider" and therefore not to be trusted -- if you're involved with NASA, these people will latch on to anything you say that seems to support them, but dismiss even the clearest, most well-documented rebuttals. After all, you're working for the government, of course you'd say that. :-P
Give me a break! Those people at Goddard were working their arses off just to keep the damned spacecraft working and the data flowing -- there was no time (or inclination or, most probably ability) to keep a giant dark secret about aliens or whatever.
Ditto the lunar journeys. Feh.
The Russians are, collectively, the best reason not to believe the Apollo revisionists -- if we really didn't send men on those spacecraft, the Russians had the technology to find out. They would've screamed bloody murder. Besides, why bother to fake Apollo 13?