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Tuesday 24th September

I’m not generally impressed when some public figure takes a swing at someone. I thought, for example, that John Prescott should not have been able to simply punch a man (there is a good video capture here) without facing prosecution for assault. I’m not saying he wasn’t provoked, but if you or I punched a man who had thrown an egg at us we would certainly end up on a charge. Politicians should certainly not be held to a lower standard of behaviour.

Having said that, I have some sympathy for Buzz Aldrin slugging Bart Sibrel, and I’m glad he will not be prosecuted for it. This is not as inconsistent as it may seem, and it isn’t because Buzz Aldrin is a genuine hero while John Prescott is simply a yobbish politician (though I admit you could argue that case). The difference is in the level of provocation.

Bart Sibrel has done more than throw an egg at Aldrin. He is one of the nuts — I’m being polite here, you understand — who insist that the lunar landings were faked. As far as I can see he, like the others who cling to this notion, bases this insistence on a gross over-estimation of his own grasp of science, as well the urge (I suspect) to be himself famous and probably a viewing of the godsawful Capricorn One.

Most people’s knowledge of the assertions of this particular frond on the lunatic fringe probably derive from a Fox TV programme which was portentously narrated by MItch Pileggi. (It was recently shown here on Channel 5, which only goes to show that it is possible to find worse programming than soft porn.) I saw a chunk of this — or perhaps “crock” would be a better term, since anyone who actually knows anything at all about optics, physics, or astronomy should have been able to easily see through the dubious arguments and fallacious assumptions. If you don’t know anything at all about science, you can find a good explanation of how egregiously wrong the Fox programme was at Phil Plait’s Bad Astronomy site. Plait introduces his analysis of the programme like this:

The biggest voice in this is Bill Kaysing, who claims to have all sorts of hoax evidence, including pictures taken by the astronauts, engineering details, discussions of physics and even some testimony by astronauts themselves. The program’s conclusion was that the whole thing was faked in the Nevada desert (in Area 51, of course!). According to them, NASA did not have the technical capability of going to the Moon, but pressure due to the Cold War with the Soviet Union forced them to fake it.

Sound ridiculous? Of course it does! It is. So let me get this straight right from the start: this program is an hour long piece of junk.

From the very first moment to the very last, the program is loaded with bad thinking, ridiculous suppositions and utterly wrong science. I was able to get a copy of the show in advance, and although I was expecting it to be bad, I was still surprised and how awful it was.

That puts it very well; a thoroughly fair assessment of the quality of the programme. In fact, even having previously seen Plait’s site, I was still astonished at how abysmal the supposed documentary was.

Also worth looking at is Moon Base Clavius’s page on radiation exposure — one of the lynchpins of the hoax idea is that it is impossible to go to the Moon because of the intense radiation in the Van Allen Belts. The Clavius page explains clearly why that isn’t the case — and also why the idea that the astronauts would need thick lead shielding is not just not true, such shielding would actually make matters worse.

Moon Base Clavius is, by the way, devoted to the Apollo programme, but it uses a stylistic theme based on 2001: A Space Odyssey (hence the name, of course). The design is quite appealing, and although the HTML isn’t perfect it’s better than average. It reminds me of the last but one design for this site, which was styled for the first half of 2001 after 2001, if you see what I mean. I think Clavius looks better than this site did, though.

The main proponent of the “Moon hoax” claims, as noted above in the quote from Phil Plait’s site, is Bill Kaysing who trades on the fact he worked for the Rocketdyne Research Department in California and had

top-secret clearance and Atomic Energy Commission … clearance and of course I was in on all of the top secrets about the development of Mercury and Gemini and, of course, Atlas, and, eventually, Apollo.

That sounds impressive, but he wasn’t a researcher, he was head of technical publications. He doesn’t by any means try to obscure this fact, but it often is not clearly brought out when he is referred to by other True Believers. It needs to be emphasised that technical writers tend not to have in-depth knowledge of every scientific discipline their writing covers.

I would suspect that if Kaysing has deep knowledge of any discipline it would probably be in the engineering line; perhaps his knowledge is better than a layman’s when it comes to astronomy, knowledge of the lunar environment, and the risks of spaceflight — but given how abysmal the average layman’s knowledge of such things is, that really isn’t saying much. He also seems to have some odd notions about what NASA went to the Moon to do:

Doesn’t NASA say that the reason there were no stars is because their cameras weren’t set for the proper exposure, isn’t that their line?
That’s their line and that’s pure baloney, because I’ve talked to photographic experts who say that NASA have all the money in the world to have a camera that would have taken magnificent pictures of stars.

That is from a transcript of an interview with Kaysing (one which either accepts his statements at face value or is really, really good at giving him a lot of rope with which to hang himself). It doesn’t seem to have occurred to Kaysing that the best place to take pictures of stars is from orbit, not the lunar surface, and that taking pictures of stars was not why NASA went to the Moon in the first place. I’d be very surprised if there were many people who couldn’t grasp that what NASA and everyone else was interested in was the Moon, and what the astronauts were doing.

Actually, it’s worth looking at the rest of his answer to that question:

But there’s a little problem, you know, the temperature on the moon is 250°F during the lunar day, and a friend of mine put some film in an oven and ran it up to 250 and the film just curled up. If you notice that the Hasselblad camera is worn outside of the astronaut’s suit and it is not curled in any way. So that camera would have heated up to the temperature to bake cookies in a very short time, because the Sun on the moon is absolutely relentless, there’s no atmosphere to mitigate the heat of the Sun. So it’s obvious that the pictures that they brought back were not taken on the moon, nor could they have actually taken any pictures on the moon, even if they had gone there.

If Kaysing actually understood anything about the lunar environment — in fact, let’s not be too kind: if he understood anything about science — he would realise that sticking an unprotected film in an oven (where heat is transmitted primarily by convection and conduction) at just over 120°C is not comparable to having film protected by a specially designed camera on the lunar surface (where heat is transmitted almost entirely by radiation).

If he knew what he was talking about he would grasp the fact that an atmosphere also spreads the solar heat. This is why on hot days we talk about the temperature being, say, 28° in the shade — the air itself is warm, so even getting out of direct sunlight does not get you out of the heat. The Moon is different: because there is no atmosphere, this does not happen and when you are in the shade you get no heat from the Sun, no matter how hot exposed areas of the lunar surface may be.

It is also worth noting that NASA were not as stupid as Kaysing appears to think they were. They knew very well that anyone out on the lunar surface would be exposed to a great deal of solar heat in the middle of the lunar day, which is why they didn’t land in the middle of the lunar day, but early in the lunar morning.

Just in case you think Kaysing is an average guy who has somehow got hold of the wrong end of the stick and can’t see the mistakes he has made, here are four further quotes from him, which I’ll present without comment. Quote 1:

Well, why did they keep faking the Apollo flights… If the Soviet Union knew, why did they let the U.S. get away with this?

Well, I’ll tell you — at the highest levels there is a coalition between governments. In other words, the Soviets said, if you won’t tell on us — and they faked most of their space exploration flights — we won’t tell on you. It’s as simple as that.

Quote 2:

No, [the Apollo 1 capsule fire] was no accident. They murdered them because, you see, I found out just recently that whenever NASA was in trouble they would call on the CIA. No we all know that the CIA has and can kill anybody they want without any feeling of conscience whatsoever. So it’s my feeling that the CIA was hired by NASA to very adroitly kill Grissom, Chaffee and White.

Quote 3:

Yeah, and you know why [Challenger] blew up? Because Christa McAuliffe, the only civilian and only woman aboard, refused to go along with the lie that you couldn’t see stars in space. So they blew her up, along with six other people, to keep that lie under wraps. I claim that Christa McAuliffe was murdered.

Quote 4:

[I]t’s like Pearl Harbor. They managed to cover up the truth at Pearl Harbor since December 7, 1941. Everybody that was in W.W.II, including me, knows that the Japanese were set up to do it. In fact, some people told me that two shiploads of gold were sent to Japan to finance Pearl Harbor, they were sent by the British. So the British wanted us involved in the war and Pearl Harbor seemed like a good way to do it.

… Roosevelt not only knew about the attack, he helped arrange it, and he suppressed the information about the Japanese attacks from Kimmel and Short, the naval and army commanders at Pearl Harbor. This was one of the biggest hoaxes perpetrated by the U.S. government to get us involved in a deadly war. There’s no question that it was all set up.

Bart Sibrel, to get back to the subject we started with, makes no claims to be any sort of expert. Here’s how Phil Plait describes Sibrel:

He claims to have been a journalist (although he actually was only a part-time editor at a local Nashville NBC affiliate for a couple of months, and “he has no right whatsoever to claim any association with our news organization” according to the news director there.)

Actually, he claims a lot of things that turn out not to be true. He created a “documentary” called “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Moon”, which he claims is full of evidence the landings were faked. In reality, his claims are completely wrong. His evidence is either grossly misinterpreted by him or just plain wrong.

Well, that’s par for the course with the proponents of the Moon hoax claim. Moon Base Clavius, by the way, has a page refuting Sibrel’s “top ten points" — worth reading despite the uncharacteristic error in the title which calls him “Bob” Sibrel. The ten points aren’t picked at random, by the way, the list is actually Sibrel’s. You may think it is unlikely that anyone, however bonkers, would actually have as one of their Top Ten Reasons Why No Man Has Ever Set Foot on the Moon the fact that Nixon was president in 1969, but this is on Sibrel’s list.

What is different (as far as I know, anyway) about Sibrel from other Moon hoax nuts is the way he stalks astronauts:

He has been known to stake out Apollo astronauts and then leap out, asking them to swear on a Bible that they did indeed walk on the Moon. Why would he do this? If they do swear, what does he say? Apparently nothing, because Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell says he did indeed swear on a Bible for Mr. Sibrel, yet there is no mention of this in Mr. Sibrel’s website or video. And if they don’t swear, of course, he can claim it’s because they are liars.

Sometimes making that kind of claim can get you in trouble. It certainly did with Buzz Aldrin. Mr. Aldrin, the second man to walk on the Moon, was ambushed by Mr. Sibrel with the Bible trick. On September 9, 2002, Mr. Sibrel jumped out at Mr. Aldrin with the Bible, daring him to swear on it. told [sic] Mr. Sibrel to go away repeatedly, and even asked for the police. When Mr. Sibrel physically blocked his path, Mr. Aldrin (who is 72, 5′10″ and 160 pounds) punched Mr. Sibrel (37, 6′2″ and 250 pounds) in the face.

The BBC report we started with also includes this description of the confrontation:

Mr Aldrin … said he merely struck out to defend himself and his stepdaughter, who was with him at the time.

Beverly Hills police … said that the charges were dropped after witnesses came forward to say that Mr Sibrel had aggressively poked Mr Aldrin with the Bible before he was punched.

Witnesses also told police that Mr Sibrel had lured Mr Aldrin to the hotel under false pretences in order to interview him.

Deputy District Attorney Elizabeth Ratinoff told Reuters news agency that a videotape shot by a cameraman hired by Mr Sibrel had shown the film-maker follow Mr Aldrin, calling him a “thief, liar and coward”.

This use of false pretences is not new for Sibrel. Ed Mitchell says:

Sibrel faked his way into my home with false History Channel credentials for an interview. After about 3–4 minutes, he popped the bible question. Realizing who he was, I maintained my cool enough to swear on his bible, then ended the interview and tossed him out of the house, with a boot in his rear.

It does seem to me that being accosted by a man who calls you, and not for the first time, a liar, a thief and a coward, who pokes you with a Bible as he does so, and who will not let you get away from him is more than adequate provocation for a physical response. It says something for the type of men the Apollo astronauts are that no one has decked Sibrel before.

My sympathies, just in case you haven’t spotted it, are wholly with Buzz Aldrin — and indeed with the rest of the Apollo astronauts who have had to put up with the slanders of this bunch of, there’s no better word, lunatics.

An amusing afternote: Bart Sibrel uses the domain moonmovie.com for his assertions and to sell the video he claims — mendaciously or erroneously, take your pick — contains previously unknown footage which proves the lunar missions were faked. It obviously hasn’t occurred to him to get the domain bartsibrel.com…