There's A Moon In The Sky

Some years ago, my ex-wife was visiting my mother’s house and she picked up a copy of ‘Good Housekeeping’ magazine. She took great exception to an article which made a reference to ‘this explains what your children get up to when they are away at university’. My ex- objected to the assumption that all children went to university when, at the time, it was only around a third of the country’s children. I disagreed and said that the important thing was to understand that Good Housekeeping knew its readers and their children went to university. It was not so much bias as understanding what the readership wanted to hear.

Bias exists in everything – believe it or not, this blog is not an impartial bearer of truth, but is trying to achieve some of my aims as well as satisfying some of your beliefs. However, what it does deal in is some kind of attempt at truth. In the social media age, we have moved beyond an understanding of bias and on to outright lies being purveyed as news. During 2018, I was genuinely surprised when someone who I regard as intelligent and sensible said that they thought that the moon landings were faked.

One thing I learnt last year was that the truth is no longer self-evident. I have no doubt that the USA landed on the moon in 1969 for a number of reasons. The first is simply financial – the USA spent a vast amount of its budget in the 1960s on something and if it were buying a soundstage in Los Angeles then they really did over-pay. Then there is the complexity of keeping all those NASA employees on the payroll but also lying about their achievements for fifty years and counting. Finally, we know how scared the Americans were by the Soviet Union being the first country to launch a satellite and put a man in space. I once read a fascinating book about horror and science fiction films in the late 50s and 60s which examined how often American films imagined an enemy in the sky, in space or otherwise looking down on them. The USA poured vast resources into getting to the moon because otherwise the Soviet Union would have got there first.

If you are nodding along with all this, then here is the other thing that I learnt last year. There is no point telling anyone any of this. About a year ago, the Daily Mail recycled (deliberate use of the word) a story about how refilling plastic bottles of water ‘can cause cancer’. This is nonsense and based on a hoax started about nine years ago and is also a dangerous hoax since reducing plastic waste is an important environmental goal. At first this story sounded plausible to me, but a little research (there is a particularly good statement from Cancer Research UK on the subject) showed it to be wrong and a friend who is knowledgeable about hoaxes and scams told me how old it is. I am making no claims of insight here - I believed it when I first heard it.

This started a very interesting new process. If the tabloid newspapers were saying something on a Friday, then I would be sure to be in work on a Monday early enough to do a little extra research. Sometimes they did get it right, but rarely on those big headlines that are designed to outrage and mislead. I should also point out that my interest was part entertainment, which is to under-rate the damage that can be done. I met a woman training to be a GP recently who told me that doctors often see people saying things like ‘my newspaper told me that eating nothing but sprouts would be a wonder diet, so why am I ill?’. The frightening thing is that if a doctor then says that it is because the newspaper is wrong, patients will accuse them of lying (or being in the pay of ‘Big Pharma’).

You can no longer assume something like ‘the USA landed on the moon in 1969’. You have to have proof or, at least, an answer for all those people who think otherwise. Before 2018, I had never thought to question why the flag in the pictures of the moon landing appears to be fluttering. I agree with the criticism that it should not be fluttering in space, but I never thought that it was particularly significant. However, the idea that people who know more on a particular subject than you do can be trusted is no longer acceptable, it seems. I am reminded of the picture that I saw of a ludicrous American billboard advert that said, “There is no proof that vaccination works”. Someone had written graffiti across it that read, “Got polio recently?”

I decided to find out why the flag on the moon appears to be fluttering and it turned out to be a very interesting quest. I started to read around the subject. This is roughly what I pieced together from various articles and websites –

NASA did not think about taking flags to the moon. They were scientists and getting to the moon and back was going to be such an achievement that taking a flag was not really considered until the US government stepped in to insist on it. More importantly, they wanted a picture of astronauts saluting an American flag on the moon. NASA knew that this was going to be impossible as a flag was not going to fly on the moon as it would do on earth. However, government orders were government orders and they were told and/or believed that the general public would not understand why a flag would not fly in space.

So, they designed a flag that would fly. You can see it if you look carefully at any of the pictures – there is a rod in the top of the flag at a right angle to the pole. This keeps it ‘unfurled’ and visible. Not all of the rods worked and there is a picture of one of the flags with a broken rod and, guess what, the flag is hanging limp and downwards as ‘it should do’ according to those who would use the flag to claim that the moon landing never took place.

As for the fluttering, you can see a succession of pictures of Buzz Aldrin that explain this. You can see Buzz’s hand rising in salute, which gives you the timing of when the pictures are taken. As his hand is rising, the apparent ‘fluttering’ is slowing down, suggesting that he has just planted the flag in the moon’s surface and the fluttering is not wind but the flag settling into position after the energy of being pushed around by Buzz.

Yes, but we all know that the whole thing was faked on a sound stage in Los Angeles, right?

By coincidence, I recently watched a film in which people tried to create the same ‘moon landing’ pictures on a sound stage in Los Angeles using the technology that was available in 1969. One of the biggest problems was lighting. The floodlights and spotlights available in 1969 would give a shadow that went out at an angle from the person standing on the ‘moon’s’ surface, Go and put something in front of a lamp in your home and you will see the same effect. The moon landing pictures show shadows that are much straighter ... as if the source of light is coming from a very large object a long way away.

The only way to create this affect on earth is to use lasers. You need a lot of them to create a bright source of light but they should give a straighter shadow. The only problem is that the kind of lasers needed and the quantity of them too just did not exist in 1969. Your average computer user can change things on PhotoShop in 2018, but in 1969 the technology was much more limited. NASA would have had some lasers, but they would have most likely been red and that would not have been any use for replicating the sun.

There was more to the video than this but at the end, the presenter spoke to an actress playing a moon landing skeptic (I assume that she was an actress). After going through all the arguments about the 'cover up', she ended with the one argument that you can never refute about conspiracy theories - 'you're only saying this because you are part of the conspiracy'.

This last comment is important for understanding untrue news stories. They are not designed to appeal to facts, they are designed to appeal to emotions. Once emotions are confirmed, then you cannot change them with facts. This always proves to be a sticking point for logical argument. How do you change someone's emotions?

I am not sure that there is an easy answer, but I do think that you have to acknowledge their emotions and understand where they come from. For those who do not believe that the Americans landed on the moon, it is often that they resent American power and perceived arrogance. Perhaps it would help them if they were to consider how the USA could have been much more of a fairer and more equal society if the vast sums spent on landing on the moon had been spent on social programmes instead? I am sure that you could make an argument that for all the scientific advances that it brought (famously, Teflon saucepans are usually the example), there was a desire to beat the Soviet Union as the motivation for the space programme. There is also the revelation a few years ago that there was contingency planning for the astronauts being stranded on the moon - there would be no attempt to rescue them, the Nixon administration would simply have claimed that communication had been lost and left them to die.

I suppose that what I am saying is that if you are looking for reasons to criticise the moon landing, they do exist and you do not have to believe that the whole thing never happened. I think that sometimes that is the only way to engage with what people think on these issues. It sounds wrong because we tend to believe that our own opinions are based on thought and careful research, but perhaps if we dug down a bit we might find that emotions move us too. The facts help too, but I think that when you are challenging the bold headlines, you should start with the emotions that they are supposed to arouse. It is a step on from Good Housekeeping presuming that everyone's child goes to university to newspapers that would want to manipulate our emotions for political reasons, but it is the same principle of appealling to emotions.

We all may not be as logical as we would like to think.