James Irwin loading the Lunar Rover, Apollo 15, 1971 -
For those who believe this photo was faked, please explain the light source/s or how it was otherwise doctored (back in 1971) so that the light looks as if it emanates from a single, distant, extremely bright source, that is, the sun, flooding the moonscape. (Admittedly, just as we experience moonshine the moon experiences earthshine but in daytime on both planets each is "overlit" by sunlight ... and just to make clear, all lunar landings took place at lunar dawn to take advantage of the sunlight and less extreme temperatures (a moonday is 27 earth days) but, unlike on earth, because of its lack of atmosphere, the moon's sky is black both day and night.)
I am offering $5,000 to the first person who can perform a credible 10-point Occam’s Razor exercise that favours the "staged event" hypothesis over the "real event" hypothesis for the 1969-1972 moon landings. Although the evidence shows we are being and have been massively hoaxed by other events, including 9/11, the Sandy Hook massacre, the Manchester bombing (for which I have also issued a $5,000 Occam's Razor challenge), and a large number of others (seriously, the mind boggles at how many), the evidence shows that six manned moon landings occurred between 1969 and 1972 and were an astounding achievement.
Judging rules
I simply don't know what to do about judging. It was easy for the others: for the collapse of WTC-7 on 9/11 it's a structural engineer of the responder's choosing and for Sandy Hook and the Manchester bombing it's an Emergency Response coordinator of the responder's choosing. I know it wouldn't make any difference if I made it Bozo the Clown as judge - no one can come up with even a single point favouring "fire" over "controlled demolition" for WTC-7's collapse or "real" over "staged" for Sandy Hook/Manchester. However, for "staged" over "real" for the moon landings I don't know what judge responders would find acceptable but then I also doubt that anyone will be able to come up with 10 points. If you passionately believe that astronauts have never landed on the moon and have 10 points that favour "staged" over "real" and would like to claim $5,000 for them you'll simply have to consult me about who would be a credible judge - contact details at bottom.
Occam's Razor
Occam's Razor is a principle that states that the simplest explanation to fit the evidence is generally the correct one. The razor is a device used to illustrate the point that among competing hypotheses one should choose the one involving the fewest complexities and assumptions. Like a physical razor, Occam's Razor needs to be used carefully. Both sides of an argument will use Occam's Razor to prove their side - but obviously only one side is correct (or there may be another possibility not even considered). Some people approach Occam's Razor in terms of likelihood and plausibility which to my mind lacks a certain scientific rigour and seems more subjective. My approach is to think in terms of questions and assumptions. What hypothesis does the piece of evidence in question fit with the fewest assumptions and questions. And then can I compile a number of pieces of evidence that fit the hypothesis in this manner - like a glove so to speak - while any competing hypotheses lack that assemblage of pieces?
I think it's sad and dangerous that people tend to either believe most things told to them by government and media or nothing at all. We should always use reason and logic and judge only by the evidence. It's true that we are lied to all the time but that does not mean that absolutely everything is a lie and we should always be scrupulous about determining truth from lies - at least where it's important. Occam's Razor is a good tool for determining the truth - of course, it needs to be used correctly and I do marvel at how utterly incorrectly it is sometimes used.
Essentially, getting man on the moon involved a massive, highly-inventive and collaborative feat in engineering of a suitable spacecraft and other equipment, extremely skilled astronauts to man it and a skilled ground crew. The question is did the required feat of engineering occur and did the astronauts man the craft and make it on and off the moon and back with the help of skilled ground crew. Although the moon is a vast 384,000 km away and humans have not returned since 1972 despite improvements in technology, the evidence clearly shows we went. There were many roadblocks in getting there, including the tragic deaths of three astronauts, however, by the end of the decade specified by John F. Kennedy it was done. It was a truly awesome achievement and it’s a great shame that a significant number of people believe it did not happen.
Three typical kinds of argument from moon hoaxers that carry no weight:
10-point Occam's Razor exercise favouring the "real event" hypothesis over "staged event" hypothesis for the moon landings 1969-1972
1. The Russians. The desire of the US to get to the moon was triggered by a sense of competition with the Russians. It was a space race. If the landings were faked the question is begged, “Why didn’t the Russians call it out at the time or since?” This 15-minute video (with an interesting twist at the end) explains why the Russians didn't get to the moon first. One problem was the constant failing of the engines in their 30-engined rocket (the Saturn V had only five) but I believe it may also have had something to do with politics. They kept changing the man in charge while the Apollo program had Wernher von Braun, a former Nazi (at least nominally) throughout who had a very charismatic personality and seemed to keep everyone inspired to keep striving. People argue that the Russians (or any other country) have not come out on 9/11 which is true, however, 9/11 was a crime (although its criminality is of a different nature to what people think). 9/11 was, in effect, a Full Scale Exercise, involving multiple drills, pushed out as real where death and injury were staged and the only reality was the building collapses - in other words, a hoax - whereas going to the moon was a race. Competitors in a race are much more likely to jump up and down about a faker than where a major international crime has occurred.
2. No whistleblowers. No whistleblowers or insiders have made any claims of faked landings. We have to wonder why whistleblowers and insiders have spoken out on major crimes such as 9/11 and the JFK assassination but not a single one has spoken out on the moon landings, especially considering the extremely large number of people involved. (Since posting this exercise I've come to realise that virtually all 9/11 whistleblowers are "controlled opposition", however, even controlled opposition agents give away some information of the crime and there is simply absolutely nothing at all suggesting fakery from insiders of the moon landings.
3. No experts. There are no experts who have claimed, using scientific evidence, that going to the moon was an impossible feat and that the required technology was not sufficiently developed. Assertions have been made that we did not have the propulsive power nor the computing power but nothing in a scientific fashion has detailed how the Saturn V rocket could not have made it to the moon and back or how the level of computing power was not up to the task. Space enthusiast and computer scientist, Frank O’Brien, has written a comprehensive guide to the Apollo Guidance Computer that no one has claimed is fraudulent. In contrast, Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth and others have done fantastic work exposing the obvious fraudulence of the NIST reports on the collapses of the three buildings at the World Trade Centre on 9/11 and explaining how all the evidence is consistent with controlled demolition. (Since posting I realise that A&E9/11Truth are a controlled opposition outfit, nevertheless, they do tell quite a lot of important truth.)
4. Third-party imagery. The imagery from unmanned Chinese, Russian, Japanese and Indian craft is consistent with the imagery taken in the Apollo missions and shows evidence of their landing. So is the imagery in Google Moon by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter – see Neil Armstrong show footage of his landing from the 1969 landing alongside the imagery from Google Moon. If the landings were faked we have to assume that the Chinese, Russians, Indians and Japanese are in on this fakery with the Americans and that the imagery from Google Moon is faked too. Do the moon hoaxers think that if the journey is made in the future to the moon that the surface will look different? And if it matches what we’ve been shown so far will they claim that this future journey is also faked? It's really not so much the evidence of the material left behind by the Apollo missions that we need to overly concern ourselves with. How would they have known what the moon looked like before all the unmanned explorers if they hadn't gone there in the first place? Or, perhaps, from the unmanned missions back in that era, imagery was taken, and then recreated on earth but with astronauts in the video? Is that how they did it?
5. Consistency with expectations. Everything we are shown is consistent with what we would expect to see.
• Low gravity
a. The way astronauts move on the moon in video footage resembles the expected way a person in a low gravity environment would move. Claims are made that wires display but in this video, for example, wires cannot be seen and the flashes can be explained as lens flare. Additionally, when people are on a wire they will tend to rotate but there is no evidence of this in any of the footage.
b. The moon has a surface of solid rock covered by a layer of fine dust (this loose surface layer is known as regolith)
The landing module touches down on solid rock with a fine regolith. The fact that the amount of thrust being produced by the engines at the point of landing and take off is very low in comparison to a landing on earth because of the relative lack of gravitational pull combined with greater dissipation of thrust due to the lack of atmosphere, we expect to see only minimal signs of a blast crater, and this is, indeed, what we see. Some people claim there is no blast crater, however, there are definite signs of dust being blown radially from the engine exhaust and possibly signs of an actual shallow crater.
• Lack of atmosphere
This condition means that unlike Earth daytime where light is scattered by air molecules giving us a blue sky, there is minimal scattering of light particles and, during the day, most of the light hits the highly reflective surface of the moon while the sky is black. Thus the moon is lit only by reflected light from the sun (and also from the Earth) while the Earth is lit mainly by light scattered by air molecules – a very, very different look.
Lack of atmosphere means that the dust stirred up by the lunar rover immediately settles to the ground. We do not see the typical trailing dust cloud of terrestrial vehicles.
• Subtlety of consistency with expectations
A common argument against the reality of the moon landings is that there is no dust shown on the landing pads of the lunar module. In fact, there are barely visible minute amounts that can be seen in the mylar wrinkles on the landing pads at high-magnification. This level of subtlety hugs the "real" hypothesis very, very closely while being alien for fake - why on earth would anyone fake something in such a manner that most people don't even see it?
Click the link below, then click magnifier and scroll to the left of the landing pad to see minute amounts of dust.
https://www.lpi.usra.edu/resources/apollo/images/print/AS11/40/5926.jpg
Why we wouldn't necessarily expect dust in the landing pads is explained here:
https://www.apollohoax.net/forum/index.php?topic=210.0
6. Arguments easily debunked - Arguments that moon hoaxers present allegedly proving we didn’t go are easily debunked.
7. No signs of fakery. No one has identified any signs of scripting in the hours and hours of conversation between the astronauts themselves and between the astronauts and mission control. A very common claim among moon hoaxers is “could have been faked” but that is a meaningless claim. What we need is evidence of fakery. I dispute the claim that natural-sounding conversation could be carried on for hours and hours but regardless, a claim of “could be faked” does not constitute evidence. We need evidence of fakery, not assertions about the possibility of it. We see them clearly in this interview with a "witness" of the Twin Tower collapses and in the second plane melting into the south tower, a physical impossibility, on 9/11 but we don't see any for the moon landings.
8. When was it decided to fake it? No one has identified at what point going to the moon turned into an impossible dream. It would seem very strange that thousands of people would work so hard on a project they knew to be impossible for so many years. Was the intention always to fake it or did NASA realise at some point it was impossible? And what point was that? What made it impossible?
9. Where did they go if they didn't go to the moon? We saw the Saturn V take off and the astronauts come back. Where were they while not going to the moon? Wouldn't someone have seen them?
10. Specifications in full view. All the specifications of all the machinery used to take us to the moon and the various prototypes developed and abandoned are available to poke holes in. No one has. I recommend the Moon Machines series.
Do you have questions about the moon landings? If so use a search engine to find answers, you most often will.
Good debunking sites:
Moon hoax: Debunked!, Paolo Attivissimo
Debunking of Dave McGowan's, Wagging the Moondoggie (incomplete).
Debunking of Massimo Mazzucco's, American Moon (Part 1)
Debunking of Massimo Mazzucco's, American Moon (Part 2)
Apollo Hoax.net (shows links to other sites)
Debunking the Apollo Hoax
Contact me:
Petra Liverani
[email protected]
Judging rules
I simply don't know what to do about judging. It was easy for the others: for the collapse of WTC-7 on 9/11 it's a structural engineer of the responder's choosing and for Sandy Hook and the Manchester bombing it's an Emergency Response coordinator of the responder's choosing. I know it wouldn't make any difference if I made it Bozo the Clown as judge - no one can come up with even a single point favouring "fire" over "controlled demolition" for WTC-7's collapse or "real" over "staged" for Sandy Hook/Manchester. However, for "staged" over "real" for the moon landings I don't know what judge responders would find acceptable but then I also doubt that anyone will be able to come up with 10 points. If you passionately believe that astronauts have never landed on the moon and have 10 points that favour "staged" over "real" and would like to claim $5,000 for them you'll simply have to consult me about who would be a credible judge - contact details at bottom.
Occam's Razor
Occam's Razor is a principle that states that the simplest explanation to fit the evidence is generally the correct one. The razor is a device used to illustrate the point that among competing hypotheses one should choose the one involving the fewest complexities and assumptions. Like a physical razor, Occam's Razor needs to be used carefully. Both sides of an argument will use Occam's Razor to prove their side - but obviously only one side is correct (or there may be another possibility not even considered). Some people approach Occam's Razor in terms of likelihood and plausibility which to my mind lacks a certain scientific rigour and seems more subjective. My approach is to think in terms of questions and assumptions. What hypothesis does the piece of evidence in question fit with the fewest assumptions and questions. And then can I compile a number of pieces of evidence that fit the hypothesis in this manner - like a glove so to speak - while any competing hypotheses lack that assemblage of pieces?
I think it's sad and dangerous that people tend to either believe most things told to them by government and media or nothing at all. We should always use reason and logic and judge only by the evidence. It's true that we are lied to all the time but that does not mean that absolutely everything is a lie and we should always be scrupulous about determining truth from lies - at least where it's important. Occam's Razor is a good tool for determining the truth - of course, it needs to be used correctly and I do marvel at how utterly incorrectly it is sometimes used.
Essentially, getting man on the moon involved a massive, highly-inventive and collaborative feat in engineering of a suitable spacecraft and other equipment, extremely skilled astronauts to man it and a skilled ground crew. The question is did the required feat of engineering occur and did the astronauts man the craft and make it on and off the moon and back with the help of skilled ground crew. Although the moon is a vast 384,000 km away and humans have not returned since 1972 despite improvements in technology, the evidence clearly shows we went. There were many roadblocks in getting there, including the tragic deaths of three astronauts, however, by the end of the decade specified by John F. Kennedy it was done. It was a truly awesome achievement and it’s a great shame that a significant number of people believe it did not happen.
Three typical kinds of argument from moon hoaxers that carry no weight:
- Was faked - For example, flags waving in non-existent lunar breeze. The imbecility of this one really gets my goat. Yes, flags wave from movement due to handling by the astronauts ... and then so utterly consistent with the lack of atmosphere and thus lack of air resistance on the moon, they keep waving longer than they would on earth. Similar is the claim that the lack of parallelism in the shadows indicates multiple light sources and thus contradicts claims that no artificial light sources were used by the astronauts. No it doesn't. Shadow direction can be influenced by a number of factors, including elevation, so an uneven surface causes deflected shadows. Also, multiple light sources means multiple shadows and we don't see this.
- Could have been faked - There is no explanation of how the fakery was achieved or duplication of this fakery. No one, to my knowledge, has ever duplicated any of the alleged fakery or explained how it was done.
- Couldn't have happened - No scientific basis is provided for the alleged impossibility. The Van Allen belts contain radiation - no one disagrees there - but the scientific data shows that the radiation they contained and the travel time through them were sufficiently low that the astronauts could have passed through them without adverse health effects. Where's the evidence that this data is incorrect? Where is the scientific evidence that says computers weren't up to scratch or that we didn't have the propulsive power? This video explains how a large number of very specific commands were handled by using simple noun+verb combinations represented by numbers.
10-point Occam's Razor exercise favouring the "real event" hypothesis over "staged event" hypothesis for the moon landings 1969-1972
1. The Russians. The desire of the US to get to the moon was triggered by a sense of competition with the Russians. It was a space race. If the landings were faked the question is begged, “Why didn’t the Russians call it out at the time or since?” This 15-minute video (with an interesting twist at the end) explains why the Russians didn't get to the moon first. One problem was the constant failing of the engines in their 30-engined rocket (the Saturn V had only five) but I believe it may also have had something to do with politics. They kept changing the man in charge while the Apollo program had Wernher von Braun, a former Nazi (at least nominally) throughout who had a very charismatic personality and seemed to keep everyone inspired to keep striving. People argue that the Russians (or any other country) have not come out on 9/11 which is true, however, 9/11 was a crime (although its criminality is of a different nature to what people think). 9/11 was, in effect, a Full Scale Exercise, involving multiple drills, pushed out as real where death and injury were staged and the only reality was the building collapses - in other words, a hoax - whereas going to the moon was a race. Competitors in a race are much more likely to jump up and down about a faker than where a major international crime has occurred.
2. No whistleblowers. No whistleblowers or insiders have made any claims of faked landings. We have to wonder why whistleblowers and insiders have spoken out on major crimes such as 9/11 and the JFK assassination but not a single one has spoken out on the moon landings, especially considering the extremely large number of people involved. (Since posting this exercise I've come to realise that virtually all 9/11 whistleblowers are "controlled opposition", however, even controlled opposition agents give away some information of the crime and there is simply absolutely nothing at all suggesting fakery from insiders of the moon landings.
3. No experts. There are no experts who have claimed, using scientific evidence, that going to the moon was an impossible feat and that the required technology was not sufficiently developed. Assertions have been made that we did not have the propulsive power nor the computing power but nothing in a scientific fashion has detailed how the Saturn V rocket could not have made it to the moon and back or how the level of computing power was not up to the task. Space enthusiast and computer scientist, Frank O’Brien, has written a comprehensive guide to the Apollo Guidance Computer that no one has claimed is fraudulent. In contrast, Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth and others have done fantastic work exposing the obvious fraudulence of the NIST reports on the collapses of the three buildings at the World Trade Centre on 9/11 and explaining how all the evidence is consistent with controlled demolition. (Since posting I realise that A&E9/11Truth are a controlled opposition outfit, nevertheless, they do tell quite a lot of important truth.)
4. Third-party imagery. The imagery from unmanned Chinese, Russian, Japanese and Indian craft is consistent with the imagery taken in the Apollo missions and shows evidence of their landing. So is the imagery in Google Moon by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter – see Neil Armstrong show footage of his landing from the 1969 landing alongside the imagery from Google Moon. If the landings were faked we have to assume that the Chinese, Russians, Indians and Japanese are in on this fakery with the Americans and that the imagery from Google Moon is faked too. Do the moon hoaxers think that if the journey is made in the future to the moon that the surface will look different? And if it matches what we’ve been shown so far will they claim that this future journey is also faked? It's really not so much the evidence of the material left behind by the Apollo missions that we need to overly concern ourselves with. How would they have known what the moon looked like before all the unmanned explorers if they hadn't gone there in the first place? Or, perhaps, from the unmanned missions back in that era, imagery was taken, and then recreated on earth but with astronauts in the video? Is that how they did it?
5. Consistency with expectations. Everything we are shown is consistent with what we would expect to see.
• Low gravity
a. The way astronauts move on the moon in video footage resembles the expected way a person in a low gravity environment would move. Claims are made that wires display but in this video, for example, wires cannot be seen and the flashes can be explained as lens flare. Additionally, when people are on a wire they will tend to rotate but there is no evidence of this in any of the footage.
b. The moon has a surface of solid rock covered by a layer of fine dust (this loose surface layer is known as regolith)
The landing module touches down on solid rock with a fine regolith. The fact that the amount of thrust being produced by the engines at the point of landing and take off is very low in comparison to a landing on earth because of the relative lack of gravitational pull combined with greater dissipation of thrust due to the lack of atmosphere, we expect to see only minimal signs of a blast crater, and this is, indeed, what we see. Some people claim there is no blast crater, however, there are definite signs of dust being blown radially from the engine exhaust and possibly signs of an actual shallow crater.
• Lack of atmosphere
This condition means that unlike Earth daytime where light is scattered by air molecules giving us a blue sky, there is minimal scattering of light particles and, during the day, most of the light hits the highly reflective surface of the moon while the sky is black. Thus the moon is lit only by reflected light from the sun (and also from the Earth) while the Earth is lit mainly by light scattered by air molecules – a very, very different look.
Lack of atmosphere means that the dust stirred up by the lunar rover immediately settles to the ground. We do not see the typical trailing dust cloud of terrestrial vehicles.
• Subtlety of consistency with expectations
A common argument against the reality of the moon landings is that there is no dust shown on the landing pads of the lunar module. In fact, there are barely visible minute amounts that can be seen in the mylar wrinkles on the landing pads at high-magnification. This level of subtlety hugs the "real" hypothesis very, very closely while being alien for fake - why on earth would anyone fake something in such a manner that most people don't even see it?
Click the link below, then click magnifier and scroll to the left of the landing pad to see minute amounts of dust.
https://www.lpi.usra.edu/resources/apollo/images/print/AS11/40/5926.jpg
Why we wouldn't necessarily expect dust in the landing pads is explained here:
https://www.apollohoax.net/forum/index.php?topic=210.0
6. Arguments easily debunked - Arguments that moon hoaxers present allegedly proving we didn’t go are easily debunked.
- The flag waving in the non-existent breeze on the moon is one of the most ludicrous claims. The flag only waves while astronauts are handling it or for a short time afterwards and we would expect the flag to wave longer after handling than on earth because of the lack of air resistance.
- The claim that the level of radiation in the Van Allen belts would have prevented the missions is simply an assertion. There is radiation but it was calculated that the time spent in them was insufficient for dangerous exposure.
- Then there are arguments about shadows. These have been debunked too. A common theme is “multiple light sources”, however, multiple light sources mean multiple shadows but we do not see them.
7. No signs of fakery. No one has identified any signs of scripting in the hours and hours of conversation between the astronauts themselves and between the astronauts and mission control. A very common claim among moon hoaxers is “could have been faked” but that is a meaningless claim. What we need is evidence of fakery. I dispute the claim that natural-sounding conversation could be carried on for hours and hours but regardless, a claim of “could be faked” does not constitute evidence. We need evidence of fakery, not assertions about the possibility of it. We see them clearly in this interview with a "witness" of the Twin Tower collapses and in the second plane melting into the south tower, a physical impossibility, on 9/11 but we don't see any for the moon landings.
8. When was it decided to fake it? No one has identified at what point going to the moon turned into an impossible dream. It would seem very strange that thousands of people would work so hard on a project they knew to be impossible for so many years. Was the intention always to fake it or did NASA realise at some point it was impossible? And what point was that? What made it impossible?
9. Where did they go if they didn't go to the moon? We saw the Saturn V take off and the astronauts come back. Where were they while not going to the moon? Wouldn't someone have seen them?
10. Specifications in full view. All the specifications of all the machinery used to take us to the moon and the various prototypes developed and abandoned are available to poke holes in. No one has. I recommend the Moon Machines series.
Do you have questions about the moon landings? If so use a search engine to find answers, you most often will.
Good debunking sites:
Moon hoax: Debunked!, Paolo Attivissimo
Debunking of Dave McGowan's, Wagging the Moondoggie (incomplete).
Debunking of Massimo Mazzucco's, American Moon (Part 1)
Debunking of Massimo Mazzucco's, American Moon (Part 2)
Apollo Hoax.net (shows links to other sites)
Debunking the Apollo Hoax
Contact me:
Petra Liverani
[email protected]