EXCLUSIVE: Stanley Kubrick Confesses to FAKING the Moon Landings in New INTERVIEW

[Mystic Wanderer]

This is a thread I posted on the old board that I wanted to bring here because it brought a lot of debate.  I think it still bears discussion today.
I posted a video on the last page that I think a lot of members missed that could answer the questions concerning all this.
Sol posted a long debate, and very well thought out, but I can't post it here because it's not my post.  (Sol, hint-hint!)




A filmmaker, T. Patrick Murray, interviewed Kubrick three days before his death in March 1999. He signed an 88-page NDA not to divulge the contents of the interview until 15 years after his death.
"Shooting Stanley Kubrick" first 30 minutes preview in the video below.

If this is true, the implications are profound!!!!

Source

Here is a transcript from the interview: (Read more on the source page)

K: I'm so preoccupied. With my work, innovation, risk-taking, regrets...
T: Why are you giving this interview?
K: Because, it started to get to me after awhile. Well, this is difficult, because it is the first time I've talked about it. (sighs)
T: Sure, take all the time you need. K: I've always been conflicted by it, but not consciously until years later. I was just blown away by the chance, the opportunity, the challenge of making this, this production, and I went into this like it was a regular film, like another regular film of mine, not thinking too much about uh the long term effects of what it would mean to society if it was ever discovered.
T: What are you talking about? I'm dying to know what you're talking about.
K: Well, a confession of sorts. A movie I made, that nobody is aware of - even though they've seen it.
T: A movie you made, no one knows you made? Is that what you said?
K: That's right. Is that intriguing? Do I have you intrigued?
K: I perpetrated a huge fraud on the American public, which I am now about to detail, involving the United States government and NASA, that the moon landings were faked, that the moon landings ALL were faked , and that I was the person who filmed it. T: Ok. (laughs) What are you talking...You're serious. Ok.
K: I'm serious. Dead serious.
K: Yes, it was fake.
T: Ok. Wait. Wait...
T: I don't want this to be an R-rated film, but seriously, what the blank, but seriously...
T: I, I, I worked almost eight months to secure this once in a lifetime interview that almost no else could ever get, and instead of talking about his sixteen films that I've endured since I was a child...That we didn't land on the moon, you're saying?
K: No, we didn't. K: It was not real.
T: The moon landings were fake?
K: A, a, a.. fictional moon landing. A fantasy. It was not real.
K: Don't you think it's important for people to know the truth?
T: The moon landing in '69, which was two years before my birth...
K: Is total fiction.
T: Total fiction.
T: Is that?...So, that's the 15 year thing. So that's makes sense now. That's why I can't release it for 15 years now, that makes total sense now.
T: Did we...we didn't land on the moon you're saying?
K: No, we didn't. T: Why are you telling me?
K: A, a, a, a massive fraud. An unparalleled fraud perpetrated against them. They SHOULD know.
K: Nixon want to uh, they were planning, yeah, he want to fake this, this moon landing...
T: Are you contending that people DON'T want to know the truth about the world, reality, the moon landings...?
K: The government, knowing this, takes advantage of it by perpetrating fraud after fraud after fraud.
T: How did you end up giving in? Being complicit with this fraud?
K: I didn't want to do it.
T: This is NOT where I thought this interview was going!
K: With my help, with my, with my aid, and it is, it is bothering me.
T: I only have this certain amount of time with you. And I'll talk about whatever you want, but...
T: You're not...This isn't some type of joke, or...
K: No. No, it's not.
T: Or a film within a film thing...
K: Not joking. NOPE.
T: Okay. K: The conspiracy theorists were right, on this occasion.
T: I don't know what to ask you first.
K: I thought it was wrong, I just...I didn't believe in perpetrating a fraud like that.
T: But you did.
K: It also undermined my artistic integrity to do that.
T: Ok, but you ended up saying yes. Why?
K: Well, yes, but because basically I was bribed. To put it bluntly, that's what it was. It was just a plain frakking bribe.

There are too many questions concerning the moon landing being a "real event". For instance, NASA's own experiment with Orion states they have to test shielding and see if it survives two trips through the belt coming and going. Why would this be necessary if they had already been through it when going to the moon? Using a portal could get them there without being knocked into the next galaxy, right?

Then we have the inconsistencies discussed in the first 35 minutes of this video:


It was brought to my attention that the Lunar Lander rocket motor had 10,000 pounds of thrust, and yet it left no mark on the surface of the moon, landing or leaving. Kind of odd considering the astronaut's boots left prints in the dust everywhere in the pictures we saw.

There are more questions, but those are just a few.

I still say the trip could have happened... we went there, but we used a portal, and staged the flight and landing to show to the public.


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Member, Duckforcover, pointed out it was an actor in the "interview", named Tom, not Stanley Kubrick.

Here is a video he posted that points us to this version of the interview:

The times where "Tom" is mentioned are 9:43, 14:09, and 21:35



__________________________________________________________________________________________


As I've continually stated in this thread, I do think we went to the moon... via a portal, but not in a "primitive" space shuttle.
The "Secret Space Program" people would have had the technology needed to get them there using a portal. If they had that technology "down pat", then I'm sure we (scientists on Earth) were at least at a level of "simulating" pictures to incorporate into their "fake journey" as the world looked on.
There are a lot of people who are left out of "the need to know" when it comes to the SSP, even the POTUS himself at times. I'm sure the people in the control room at NASA thought everything was just as real as the duped public did.

Some people in the SSP were probably working with a select few "high-ranking officers" in NASA to pull this off.

Souce Link

Look under Simulations.













_______________________________________________________________________________________________

And here is the post I wanted everyone to see...

Dark Side of the Moon - Stanley Kubrick and the Fake Moon Landings

Here is a video I came across a couple of days ago. It has been on You Tube for some time, but it just came to my attention.
It takes a completely different look at the whole moon landing topic that has not been suggested here.
It shows how the POTUS was involved with this, and also, how Stanley Kubrick was involved in filming the fake moon landing.

Oh yes, we went, but it could not be shown to the public due to the atmospheric conditions on the moon ruining the film.
Nixion was determined to show the public that we (the U.S.) made it to the moon one way or another; thus, the fake film.

(I still stand by my belief that we went through a star gate portal due to all the reasons I mentioned in my previous post. )

All people involved in the making of the fake film were later sought and killed to silence them.
Some even believe that Stanley Kubrick was murdered later in his life after having a fatal stroke.

This is a real eye-opener, for those who haven't watched it.



Some of comments below the video on You Tube think this was made from cut up interviews and put together out of context.
IMO, it tells the truth, and these are a bunch of hired people to comment and discredit the information being shared here.

What do you think?

[Mystic Wanderer]

https://youtu.be/U78Hl2-5Kn8

FRED, a 90 year old former technical inspector in Aviation working for an Airline back in the 60's recalls how he stumbled on a hangar in Minnesota that appeared to be at least one staging hangar for the faked part of the Apollo Moon Landings. NOTE:  We went to the moon but we had help. Fred agrees. 
The landings filmed by Stanley Kubrick were staged to cover what they really encountered on the moon:  reptilians, bases etc.  For more on this see my interview with WILLIAM TOMPKINS. We discuss that experience and other UFO sightings from pilots in the airline industry including a story about Admiral John D. Price...

[Wallfire]

Ok this is a long one but it does show the "other side"

The Life and Times of the Moon Hoax Conspiracy

Yes, it's a 3-part Skeptoid episode, the first one ever, and it took more than 500 episodes to get me to finally address the moon landing hoax conspiracy. To those who follow science, the claims that we never went to the moon are the most tiresome and foolish of the conspiracy theories; but to those who believe them, they are absolute religion, and the ultimate token of their conviction that anything coming from official sources is a lie. Today we're going to begin our in-depth analysis of the Moon Landing Conspiracy, of those who believe in it, and a survey of the facts and figures of the basic narrative.
Today we're going to talk about the history and cultural impact of the claim; next week we'll go into the most popular evidentiary claims said to prove that we never went to the moon (hopefully including some you haven't heard before); and in the final installment, we'll look at the hard physical proof that we did go.
The basic narrative of the Moon Truth conspiracy theory, as you probably know, is that NASA faked the Apollo missions and nobody ever actually went to the moon. As with most conspiracy theories, there are all sorts of variations on the claims of what actually did happen, while the only thing they have in common is that no men actually landed on the moon. Some believe the Apollo missions orbited the moon but did not land; some believe they never went farther than Earth orbit; some believe the Apollo spacecraft flew but were unmanned; some believe they never launched anything at all. The astronauts performed their moonwalks on a movie set, and fake transmissions were provided to the TV networks for broadcast. The reasons given for why the government would have gone to all this trouble range from simply distracting Americans' attention from the unpopular war in Vietnam, to fooling the Soviets into thinking they lost the Cold War, to protecting NASA's budget by appearing to spend it on something supremely impressive.
A big question we have to answer is what's the point of even talking about this? The people who believe it have already heard the science-based responses to their claims a hundred times, and rejected them a hundred times. Their minds are riveted shut to anything but their preferred narrative. We'll not be changing any of their minds today. And the rest of us aren't in denial, and aren't asking these made-up, shoehorned questions that try to raise doubt where none exists. So who is this episode for, nobody?
Well, maybe for somebody. Polling data has, for decades, consistently shown that some 6-7% of Americans believe the moon landings were faked; and even scarier, about four times as many Europeans agree with them. That's a lot more people than the hardcore YouTube-obsessed serial conspiracists; it includes tens of millions of ordinary folks who are otherwise as rational as you or I. It seems there must be something deeply compelling about this odd belief.
American Moon Truthers differ from most other conspiracy theorists in one fascinating metric: political affiliation. Most conspiracy theorists skew heavily conservative, which is not surprising; the fundamental ideology of conspiracy theories is distrust of the government, and one basic difference between the left and the right is that the left tends to favor larger government and the right tends to favor smaller government. We'd expect those who distrust the government to gravitate toward any ideology that minimizes it, and that's the basic reason conspiracy theorists tend conservative. But Moon Truthers are different. Paradoxically, most of them skew liberal, according to the survey data. To understand why, we can look at what the Apollo program represented. The moon landings were a great American triumph; in particular, beating the Soviets to the moon was the quintessential victory of capitalism over communism. Ideologically, capitalism beating communism is more appealing to the conservative than to the liberal. Thus, a conspiracy theory doubting such a victory is more ideologically appealing to the liberal. So now when we look at the conspiracy theory community in its totality, many of the pro-capitalism conservatives tend to drop of out Moon Truthing, leaving a rare liberal majority. Therein lies the difference.
The Apollo program was started in 1961, during the height of the United States' Cold War with the Soviet Union. Tensions were rising sharply. The United States had just failed with its Bay of Pigs attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro using proxy troops, and the Soviet Union prepared to move nuclear missiles into Cuba. In May of 1961, President John F. Kennedy proposed "Landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth". Whether the missiles would fly or not, this war was to be fought on the propaganda front as well. Moon Truthers have long drawn upon the importance of the propaganda war as support for their belief that the United States would have done anything to at least make it appear they were winning it.
Neither the United States nor the Soviet Union was above deception in the war to convince the world their side was the stronger. The Soviets took the Absolute World Air Speed Record in 1962 with a plane they called the Ye-166, which it turned out didn't exist; it was a modified Ye-152 fighter plane, but they didn't want us to know it could go that fast. The United States responded in 1965 by taking the record back using the YF-12A (an early version of the famous SR-71), but the plane was de-powered so much — in order to fly only just fast enough to break the record — that the pilots reported difficulty in controlling it at speeds as "slow" as Mach 3. They set six different records, all for propaganda purposes; every one of them deceptive in that none revealed the aircraft's true capability. It was a response to the Soviets' own deceptive record. No doubt, neither side hesitated to hoodwink in the name of propaganda.
Changing the model number of a plane or pulling back on a throttle are one thing, but faking a manned moon landing? And then successfully maintaining the fraud for 50 years? It's this exploration of the scope of the required coverup that's one of the strongest arguments supporting the fact that we did go — outside of the physical proof, of course, which we'll talk about in the third installment.
It's been estimated that 400,000 people were part of the Apollo program, including NASA personnel and the many subcontractors. Only one of them has ever stepped forward to claim it was a hoax: Bill Kaysing, who was a publications analyst at Rocketdyne for a couple years in the early 1960s. Kaysing's belief was not based on evidence; he said himself it was "a hunch, an intuition." In 1976 Kaysing self-published a pamphlet titled We Never Went to the Moon: America's Thirty Billion Dollar Swindle in which he claimed the Saturn V rocket was discovered to be too weak to make it to the moon; and so, on launch day, the astronauts secretly slipped out of the capsule and transferred to a mockup at a safe location, from where they made the television broadcasts. Then at the end of the mission, the men got into a duplicate capsule which was dropped into the ocean by a transport plane. It's nearly exactly the same plot as Peter Hyams' 1977 movie Capricorn One which was about a fake Mars mission. Kaysing sued for copyright infringement but the case was dismissed, and Kaysing said it was because the powerful government faked the movie script's copyright date. There may be a simpler explanation. Kaysing may have written this narrative into his book, but it was hardly the first time it had been proposed. Other less famous conspiracy theorists had been floating similar premises for years. Most likely, Hyams and Kaysing were inspired by the same folklore that predated both of their works.
Much of that folklore had been around since the Gemini program, and it came from Samuel Shenton, leader of the tiny Flat Earth Society, who had his hands full arguing for a flat Earth in the face of increasing proof against him coming from the space program, particularly the photos of Earth taken from space. Upon Shenton's death in 1971, the Society was taken over by Charles and Marjory Johnson of the Covenant People's Church, who continued charging NASA with hoaxing the Apollo program, based on their Christian Fundamentalist belief that the Earth must be flat. Charles Johnson claimed in their Flat Earth News newsletter that he had personal knowledge — as did Shenton — that author Arthur C. Clarke (whom he described as "the English creep") "wrote, directed, and narrated the moon Ianding."
It was twenty years before another famous name — this time from Hollywood — became attached to the moon hoax, and it came in the form of a satirical post to a usenet newsgroup titled "Stanley Kubrick and the Moon Hoax". It claimed that NASA recruited Kubrick (who had just finished 2001: A Space Odyssey) and special effects guru Douglas Trumbull to spend 16 months on a sound stage in Huntsville, Alabama filming the moon landing footage. It was an obvious put-on, including references to a non-existent brother. The anonymous author of this post may have been inspired by the fact that Kubrick co-wrote 2001 with Johnson's suspect Arthur C. Clarke. Twenty years after the satire, we see the butterfly effect it had. The 2013 film Room 237portrayed what I call the "Kubrick conjecture", and in those intervening years it has come to not only be taken seriously, but has grown into a tapestry of staggering proportions. It is 100% evidence free, yet fills volumes with its intricacies and constructs.
As one of the most famous directors in the world, just about everything about Kubrick's life and work from those years is documented, and he doesn't seem to have ever disappeared for 16 months. But forget about that. Landing on the moon once would have been enough to win the propaganda war with the Soviets, and there would have been no need to sextuple the risk of the hoax being discovered by repeating the feat five more times. But forget about that too. 3,500 journalists from all over the world investigated, researched, reported, and actually watched every moment of Apollo 11 from beginning to end, and nobody uncovered the slightest indication that everything was not as it seemed, but let's even forget about that. The Moon Truther movement is not about likelihood or plausibility or even facts, but about conspiratorial ideology. Next week, we're going to uncover some of the most dramatic results of that ideology when we look at the Moon Truthers' specific claims.

Part 2

The Horrible "Evidence" that We Never Went to the Moon

This is the second installment in an unprecedented three-part Skeptoid episode about the Moon Landing Conspiracy. Last week we talked about the history and character of the conspiracy theory, and next week we're going to look at the physical evidence that proves man went to the moon. But this week we're going to talk about that part of the conspiracy you've probably heard the most about, and that's the various claims of glitches and errors that supposedly suggest the Apollo program was a hoax that never happened.

Let's launch right into these, starting with the first major problem that the Moon Truthers say the astronauts could have never overcome:

It's impossible for humans to leave low Earth orbit, due to the lethal radiation in the Earth's Van Allen Radiation Belts.

The Van Allen Radiation Belts are rings around the Earth's magnetic pole, tall and thin rather than flat like Saturn's ring. They consist of charged particles magnetically trapped in place. While it's true that the Van Allen Belts are a high-radiation zone and a dangerous place to loiter, astronauts can go through them in about an hour. Even without any special radiation shielding, this trip exposes astronauts to about 1 rem, about the same as 100 chest X-rays. This is about 20 times what a US nuclear plant worker is allowed to receive in a year, so it's above normal safety levels. But not catastrophically so. You would need to get 100 times that much to develop the first signs of radiation sickness. The astronauts were all well aware of this, and considered the trip well worth the risk.

We should not have been able to hear the astronauts talking during the Lunar Module descent, because of how loud the rocket motor would have been.

Seemingly true; rocket motors are insanely loud, and if you're sitting just a meter or two away from one it would be pretty hard to hear yourself think. Yet the Apollo astronauts calmly narrated their descent over the radio to mission control, with no interfering roar.

Obviously there's no air and thus no sound outside the craft, and on Earth, almost all of a rocket's noise comes from shearing action between the exhaust jet and the surrounding atmosphere. With that taken out of the equation, rockets are much more peaceful. Significant vibration did transfer through the structure to the astronauts during descent, but comparatively little noise. In any case, their microphones were inside their insulating helmets, mounted close to their mouths, with audio patterns designed to pick up only extremely close sounds. There is no reason to expect their voices would have been drowned out by rocket noise.

All photos of the Lunar Module on the surface must be fake, because the blast crater created by its landing rocket is missing.

No blast crater would be expected, although this seems admittedly counterintuitive. When the Lunar Module came in to land, it came in with horizontal velocity as the pilot searched for a place to land. Once he found one, he descended, throttled back, and a probe extending over a meter below the landing pads touched the ground and shut off the rocket motor. It was only a very brief moment that the rocket nozzle was actually directed at the landing site, and only at reduced power.

Even so, the moon's surface is not very prone to disruption. Although we see astronaut footprints in a dusty surface, that surface dust is quite thin. Below that, the regolith is much firmer. Probably a small amount of surface dust was displaced below the lander, but not very much.

The Lunar Module's landing rocket also would have blasted all the dust away from the area, so the astronauts wouldn't have left any footprints.

There's no air on the moon and no shockwaves. Nearly all of the wind and turbulent clouds you see at a rocket launch are the result of air being pushed by the rocket exhaust, and pushing other air, and so on. To fly, the rocket only needs the reaction. It does not require things on the ground getting blown around, and if there's no air or wind to do it, it won't happen.

Gas from the rocket nozzles expands very quickly in the vacuum of space, and the descent motor had a wide dispersal pattern. You probably could have sat in a beach chair a few meters from the Lunar Module as it landed, and not felt much.

The astronauts' footprints are so deep that the heavy Lunar Module must have sunk in much deeper.

The footprints weren't all that deep; a centimeter or two at most. And although the various Lunar Modules did weigh some 17 to 19 metric tons when fully loaded on Earth, on the moon that was down to about 1200 kg after burning off fuel. That weight was distributed on four 1-meter round footpads. The pressure exerted on the surface by the footpads was only about half again as much as by the astronaut's boot soles. So the Lunar Modules would be expected to push a little bit deeper into the surface than an astronaut, but probably not a noticeable amount.

The American flag they planted is flapping in a supposedly-nonexistent breeze.

By now we've all heard that the flag was held by a rigid metal rod to compensate for the lack of wind on the moon, but it's worth mentioning that in some of the video footage, the illusion of air movement can be quite remarkable, and it's worth watching. But the cause is embarrassingly obvious: in all such shots, an astronaut is either actively twisting the flagpole to get it set up, or he bumps it. This is one claim that really needs to just die already.

Sometimes you'll see a photo of one astronaut with the other reflected in his helmet visor, and neither one of them has a camera up to his face taking a picture.

Proof that a conspiring studio photographer was present on the set taking these pictures? No, proof that the cameras were mounted to the astronauts' chests.

Stars would be visible in all the photos if they'd really been taken from the Moon.

No they wouldn't, because the cameras' exposure settings were adjusted for bright daylight, giving a very small aperture. To capture stars, you need a very large aperture. Test it for yourself: Set your aperture, ISO, and exposure so that you're taking great pictures in the daylight. Then with the same settings, try to photograph anything at all at night. Blackness.

It's impossible to take any photos on the moon with a film camera, since film would have melted in the 120°C/250°F surface temperature.

Regular cameras and regular film, yes. But the Apollo astronauts used cameras and film specially made by Eastman Kodak. The cameras were heavily insulated against temperature, and the film had a much higher temperature range. Imagine, NASA actually thought of this before the conspiracy theorists did.

The light source in the photos is not the distant sun, because there are non-parallel shadows.

The photos did show non-parallel shadows, because of a little thing we call perspective. Look at a fence with the sun behind you, and the shadows of the fence posts will appear to converge; look at the fence with the sun behind it and the shadows will appear to diverge. No mystery here.

Some shadows are long while others are short, again proving the distant sun is not the light source.

This claim is mainly based on a couple of photos of astronauts where their shadows extend to the top of the same mound, even though one is closer to it than the other. The reason is simply that the ground undulates. The length of a shadow depends on the angle of the sun relative to the angle of the ground, and on an undulating surface, we absolutely expect objects of the same height to have shadows of different lengths.

Studio lights are visible in the background of some photos.

There are indeed bright spots in the sky that look exactly like lights in some of the photos. Photographers know what they are: they're called lens flares, which can appear when bright light reflects between the lens surfaces inside the camera. The type of lens flares in the Apollo photographs form in a line leading toward a bright light source just outside the frame, in this case, the sun.

The studio lights cause hot spots on the surface of the moon.

In some photos where the photographer's shadow is visible in the frame, there are unusually bright spots on the moon surface around the shadow, suggesting that a studio light must have been focused on that spot.

Proof of a conspiracy? Nope. These hot spots are called Heiligenscheins, a German word meaning halo. You can see it any time you look at the shadow of your own head, sometimes more dramatically than others, and often better from a greater distance. You've seen it from a plane when you look down and see the plane's shadow with a strangely bright area around it. Heiligenscheins are caused by two different effects. Looking at the shadow of your own head, the light source is directly behind you. Everything directly outside that shadow — blades of grass, pebbles, whatever — has the light hitting it from an angle very close to your viewing angle, so shadows are foreshortened almost to zero. Objects farther from your shadow are less foreshortened, so there is more and more shadowed area visible in your field of view. Thus the overall light level is always going to be highest closer to your shadow, and progressively darker the farther away you look.

The second effect causing Heiligenscheins happens when the surface is reflective; moon regolith would be one example, dewy grass another. It's called backscatter. A greater proportion of light (and other radiation) is always bounced back in the same direction from which it came, which is why radar works. When you look at the shadow of your head, backscatter sends more light toward you from objects on the ground closest to the shadow. The farther away those objects are, the less of their backscatter is going toward your eyes. Combine these two effects, and the Heiligenscheins we see in the lunar photographs are exactly what we'd expect to see if they were genuine.

One rock was accidentally left showing the letter C written on it, proving it was a prop.

No, it wasn't. Photo analysts have concluded the most likely explanation for this apparent letter C on a rock is a hair on the original photo print. To say nothing of the fact that no Hollywood prop master ever heard of labeling inventory by boldly writing letters of the alphabet on camera-facing surfaces. Anyway, for presumed hoaxers to use a commercial Hollywood prop shop for a moon landing set would have introduced another unnecessary risk: more outside people who would have known about it, and a paper trail for the prop rental. Smart conspirators would have built the set themselves, with rocks they trucked in themselves.
Those are the basic answers, but there are many many more such claims and we would have had to make this a ten-part episode to cover them all. But we really don't need any more, because next week we'll continue by looking at the scientific proof that we actually did put humans on the moon.

Part 3

The Scientific Proof that We Went to the Moon

This week we're going to wrap up our mega three-part Skeptoid episode debunking the conspiracy theory that claims we never went to the moon. Two weeks ago, we talked about the life and times of the conspiracy theory, its genesis and its evolution; and last week we covered some of the basic claims made by conspiracy theorists who analyze the Apollo photos and videos and conclude that it must have taken place on a sound stage. But this week, as a finale, we're going to go into the most interesting and educational part of the story: how we know for a fact that human beings from the Earth actually traveled to the moon, and walked around, and made it back safely.

Let's begin with a tidbit that's been among the most exciting in recent years:

Photographic Proof of the Apollo Landing Sites

For a long time, one of the most significant (and convincing) arguments that we never went to the moon was that there are no photos of the landing sites. If there really are six lunar landers sitting up there, oughtn't we be able to point any old telescope at the moon and see them? Scientists always said no, our telescopes aren't strong enough. But that seemed ridiculously hard to believe. Imagine our giant telescopes on top of Mauna Kea — or even the Hubble space telescope that photographs the most distant objects in the universe — or even the numerous spy satellites in orbit that are said to be able to read license plates. Even I will readily admit that it sounded absurd that telescopes like these couldn't easily resolve landing sites on something as close as the moon. That lack of proof, which seems like it should have been so easy for NASA to provide, was pretty worrisome for some who were on the fence about whether we actually ever went there.

But as we all now know, in 2009 when we launched the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter to orbit the moon and photograph it close-up, we got the first pictures of the landing sites. They show all the hardware left behind, and even rover tire tracks and astronaut footprint tracks. In 2011 the LRO sent back much sharper pictures, and we now finally have great images of the sites. Two interesting things happened. The first interesting thing is that the 6-7% of Americans who doubted that we went to the moon before these images appeared continued to doubt that we went to the moon. Predictably, in this age of computer generated imagery, the pictures changed nobody's mind at all.

The second interesting thing is that we finally have an answer to the question of why we never had these pictures before, with all our giant, powerful telescopes. The LRO images are fairly good, but its camera is pretty small. Let's compare it to Hubble to see why it was able to see what Hubble couldn't. The LRO took its first set of pictures from a height of only 50 km above the moon's surface, and its second higher-resolution set from a low orbit of only 21 km. By contrast, at its closest, Hubble gets 362,546 km from the moon. That's more than 17,000 times farther away than the LRO was able to get. So just to get pictures of this LRO quality — which are decent but not great — we have to get 17,000 times closer to the object than Hubble is. That gives you some idea of the scope of why Earth telescopes couldn't see the landing sites. The moon seems close, but it's still pretty far; and those pieces of hardware and footprints are very, very small.

Worldwide Monitoring of the Apollo Flights

When the Apollo flights took place — especially the early missions — a lot of people paid very close attention, all around the world, with telescopes, radios, and radar. The Soviets, desperate for an American failure, watched every second of every flight and tracked every spacecraft on its way to and from the moon by telescope and by radar. They never found the doubt they were looking for.

Observatories worldwide, plus countless amateurs, reported sightings of most of the Apollo spacecraft. Sky and Telescope Magazine published an article listing sightings of Apollo in 1969. These sightings included clouds from the disastrous explosion of Apollo 13's external oxygen tank, and also of stage separations for most flights. Astronomer John Keel maintains a large web database of sightings from Apollo watchers worldwide. There is little doubt that Apollo spacecraft did go to the moon.

There is also another aspect to the monitoring. Had the Apollo spacecraft remained in Earth orbit, as many Moon Truthers claim, they would have been easy to spot with the naked eye, as they were at least as large as many of the satellites you can see in today's night sky. If this had been the case, there would have been many sightings during each Apollo mission. The fact that there were no sightings reported indicates that this probably isn't what happened.

Moon Rocks

About 382 kilograms of rocks were brought back to Earth by Apollo astronauts. They are unequivocally from the moon, they would be impossible to fake on the Earth, and they didn't get here naturally as meteorites. Let's take a look at how we know these facts:

• 
  
• The Apollo moon rocks have been radiometrically dated using the rubidium-strontium method, and are up to 4.46 billion years old (and that's just among the very few rocks our guys happened to pick up). No rock on Earth is that old. There is no known way to fake that.
  
  
  
• The Apollo moon rocks bear impact craters, called zap pits, only 1mm across, created by impacts from micrometeors traveling at speeds up to 80,000 kph. This can't happen on Earth because the atmosphere blocks them, and it can't be faked because we don't have anything that can accelerate small projectiles to that speed. Even our best railguns can only reach about 1/10 that velocity.
  
  
  
• The Apollo moon rocks have isotopes, called cosmogenic nuclides, that can only be created by bombardment from high-energy cosmic rays. This doesn't happen to rocks on Earth because the atmosphere blocks these rays; and it couldn't be faked using a particle accelerator because even our most powerful can't come close to the energy level of cosmic rays. The same bombardment also caused crystal damage in the rocks, and even today, geochemists can't even suggest a way we could fake that.
  
  
  
• The Apollo moon rocks have been studied by scientists all over the world, including those from the former Soviet Union, and not one has yet challenged their authenticity.
  

We wouldn't expect the Soviets to challenge them, because they know better. In the 1970s, three Soviet missions — Luna 16, Luna 20, and Luna 24 — landed on the moon and returned 326 grams of moon rocks to Earth. The Soviets knew exactly what moon rocks were made of, and the fact that they've never questioned the authenticity of the Apollo rocks should give the Moon Truthers pause — unless they say the Soviets were in on the Apollo conspiracy, which would be in direct contradiction with Moon Truthing's fundamental claim.

Any chance that both NASA and the Soviets lied about bringing their rocks back, and simply picked up a bunch of lunar meteorites they found right here on Earth? No, because all the NASA and Soviet moon rocks lack the exterior melting, called a fusion crust, that all meteors receive when entering the Earth's atmosphere. The only lunar meteorites that lack a fusion crust are those on which it has weathered away. Such weathering is equally obvious, and is absent on all the rocks brought back from the moon. Recall the unfakeable zap pits, for example.

There truly isn't any credible narrative other than that these 382 kg of rocks were brought to the Earth from the moon in some artificially protected manner.

Retroreflectors

These are panels with a surface mottled with little right-angled cubical mirrors that reflect light out at the same angle it came in, and are used in laser range finding. The Apollo astronauts placed retroreflectors at their landing sites, and these are all regularly detected by observatories worldwide. Some were detected from Earth the very same day they were set up; some were located within a few days. In addition, the unmanned Russian landers Lunokhod 1 and Lunokhod 2 are both still sitting up there, and both have retroreflectors. No nation has ever reported being unable to detect and verify both American and Soviet retroreflectors.

Of course, this doesn't prove humans were aboard the spacecraft that carried these retroreflectors, but the acknowledgement from every country, both friendly and unfriendly, does prove — at least to the satisfaction of even our enemies — that the Apollo program successfully landed on the moon.

Surveyor 3

Surveyor 3 was an unmanned American probe that landed on the moon in 1967. When Apollo 12 landed on the moon in 1969, they decided to land at the same place. Sure enough, they touched down within sight of Surveyor 3. The astronauts removed about 10 kg of parts from it and brought them back to Earth, including the camera which is on display at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC. Examination of its glass shows tracks from high-energy solar particles, including heavy ions emitted by solar flares. These are blocked by the Earth's atmosphere, so this had to happen in space. This proves that the camera was in space, if not necessarily on the moon; and its removal from Surveyor 3 required careful manual work that couldn't have been done by a robot. So there's proof that a man was somewhere in space at some point to do the work.

I suppose it's possible to draw out some alternate scenario in which NASA could have accomplished all of these things via some narrative that differs from the historical one, but all the components of the story are proven and immovable. The alternate scenario would have to be absurdly more complex, Rube Goldberg style, and thus even riskier than simply using these components as intended, as all the evidence shows they did.
As I said two weeks ago in part 1, I doubt this series of episodes will change the minds of any hardcore Moon Truthers. But I do hope that, at a minimum, some of the science we've touched on will intrigue them enough to dig further on their own. What we know is less important than how we know it, and if we can develop a love for the learning process, eventually we'll all end up with a better understanding of our world.

I dont say that I support this but its important to understand both sides

[Mystic Wanderer]

I think we went, but not how people think.

I think the movie was done in a studio to show the public what they expected to see, but they actually went through a portal to get there.  We couldn't tell the public about using portals now, could we?     It answers both sides of the debate for me.

[Mystic Wanderer]

 

https://youtu.be/BK-uatwOOeA

Wait!  What?! 

We destroyed the technology to take us back to the moon?  Technology that cost billions of tax payer dollars?!    

Sorry, I don't buy that. 

Once again, this just reinforces my thoughts that we used a portal and help from ETs.  They have to say they destroyed the technology because we never had it to start with.   :smallwink: