Ancient Aliens on the Moon (22 page)

Apollo 16 astronaut John Young saluting the US flag on the surface of the Moon.

Even so, there are plenty of pictures from missions like the Surveyors which prove my point. In order to get the stars even to show up (for navigation and location purposes), the Surveyor spacecraft cameras had to use (in one example) a three-minute time exposure to record them. By contrast, the average exposure time of the hand-held, film photographs taken on the lunar surface by Apollo astronauts is about 1/250th of a second—or an average of forty-five thousand times shorter than the exposure required to actually record stars in the airless lunar sky. Clearly, if these “disbelievers” believe at least in the reality of the unmanned lunar landings (which at least some say they do), this simple example should satisfy even the densest Moon Hoax advocates as to the nagging question of why stars aren’t visible in the background of any Apollo surface photographs. Because they’re simply too dim.

This whole process is complicated by the fact that in a vacuum, the problem is made even worse, the light far more intense, and the exposure must be even shorter. The Moon Hoax advocates also seem to have forgotten that they are basing most of their “analysis” on press release photos, which are invariably cleaned up before release to the press. So of course, these sanitized press kit images would reflect what we all would expect to see, an absolute black background.

Surveyor 6 photo of the constellation Scorpius taken from the lunar surface.

So contrary to what the Moon Hoax advocates have been saying, the sky above the astronauts
should
be absolutely black. And in fact, on most of the prints that they have been looking at, web based images, press release photos, and even new prints from the archives, it is. The problem is that while the sky should be absolute black, and does appear that way in images presented by the Moon Hoax advocates, it most demonstrably is not absolute black in the images we examined earlier in this book.

Four NASA images showing glass structures over Oceanus Procellarum.

Apollo 16 astronaut John Young.

What Ken Johnston’s 1
^st
generation prints showed was quite another story—that the sky above the astronauts was far from blank—it was in fact filled with a strange, bluish, geometric set of ruins. So the problem is exactly the opposite of how it is stated by the Moon Hoax advocates. The sky should be black, but it isn’t.

One amusing sidelight of this famous Apollo 16 photograph is that it is used on several web sites as “proof” that many of the pictures taken on the Moon are fake, since John Young “… is casting no shadow at all” on the lunar surface. In fact, all it really shows is how dumb most of the Moon Hoax advocates really are. If you actually look at the picture, you will see that Young is casting a shadow to the right side of the picture a few feet away. How can this be? Why is the shadow not “attached” to young’s feet? Well, because in this famous sequence, John Young is leaping into the air as he is saluting, while fellow astronaut Charley Duke snaps the photo. Many Moon Hoax advocates, too young to have actually watched this all on live television, look at this picture and mistakenly believe that Young is standing on the slight dome shaped rise in the background, when in fact he is in midair (well, OK,
mid-vacuum).
This famous sequence is also a good way to show that the astronauts are indeed in the one-sixth gravity of the Moon, since in order to get this kind of elevation on Earth (especially with the bulky, several-hundred-pound spacesuit and backpack on), Young would have to have the leaping ability of Lebron James. There are many video sources available today which show this famous live TV sequence.

Claim 4 – In some images, a huge light source can be seen reflected in the astronaut’s visors. This has to be a very bright, nearby source.

This argument is essentially a variation of the first argument. Occasional images, like the ones above (taken from the Apollo 17 EVA TV transmissions and Apollo 14), seem to show a very bright, huge light source taking up almost 25% of the astronauts visor. Moon Hoax advocates argue that this is proof of a large light source (a stage flood or a spot, again) positioned very close to the astronauts. What they are missing here is essentially the same geometric problem they missed with the “bent shadows” argument. The gold-covered helmet visors that the astronauts wore were very convex shapes—similar to automotive wide- angle side mirrors included on many current models. Like the surface shadows in the earlier images above, this curved helmet has the effect of severely distorting the reflections, making them appear much smaller (and thus farther away) than they actually are.

The problem is the sun in the visor reflection pictured here appears much larger (and therefore closer) than it possibly could. The explanation for this is firmly grounded in the theory we’ve already covered; the presence of ancient, glass-like ruins on the Moon. It is these ruins, sticking up above the lunar horizon and physically intervening between the low-angle sun and the Apollo astronauts roaming across the surface, which create the magnified halo of scattered light seen in the gold visors. Since this area of forward scattering is much larger than the optical size of the sun itself, it makes the reflection appear disproportionately larger.

Image frame capture from the Apollo17 mission.

Claim 5 – There are no views of the Earth in pictures taken from the surface of the Moon.

This one also is just plain wrong. Collier was among the most enthusiastic promoters of this mistaken notion, based on studying only a few press release photographs from NASA. Below is an Apollo 17 photo of a large boulder, with the Earth in the background, taken by an astronaut with a hand-held Hasselblad 70mm camera There are dozens of other such examples. Since all the non-handheld pictures taken on or in orbit around the Moon were using a media other than 70mm transparency film, these photos had to have been taken by a human being—an Apollo astronaut — physically present either on the lunar surface or in space around the Moon.

Apollo hand-held photo of the Earth from the surface of the Moon.

Claim 6 – How could NASA take TV images of the LM ascending on Apollo 15, 16, and 17 if there was no one on the Lunar surface to man the camera?

Now, most of the Moon Hoax accusations are pretty dumb, but this one really has to take the cake. As you can see from the collection of images above (from two different missions) on the later Apollo missions (15-17) the astronauts left the TV camera pointed at the LM so that viewers on Earth could watch the liftoff. Initially, the camera was unable to track the ascent stage as it rose into space, but by Apollo 17, NASA had figured a way to get the camera to track upward and follow the spacecraft. All they did was calculate the time difference for radio transmissions from the Earth to the Moon and send a command for the camera to pan upward to follow Lunar Module ascent stage as it rose. So the answer to this one is also simple and obvious—the camera was remotely controlled from Earth.

Still frame captures of liftoff from the surface of the Moon.

Most of these claims come from James Collier’s book
Was it only a Paper Moon?

Claim 7 – The astronauts could not have egressed and ingressed the LM because they could not fit through the hatch and there was no room to even open the hatch in the LM.