Friday, December 3, 2010

I'm A Junkie

I'm a conspiracy theory junkie. I love nothing more than to get all excited about a conspiracy theory, try to prove an opposing view, and then decide whether or not I believe it. Why? Well, because I've discovered that it's not only brain exercise, but a helluva lot of fun. Besides, some people just need to expand their preconceived ideas enough to CONSIDER other possibilities. If you can't have fun with it, then I think it speaks to your creativity, or lack thereof.

I occasionally find time for a show on SyFy (WTF is with that newfangled spelling, anyway?), Fact or Faked. Last night there was one on the lunar landing. Now, I have my own theory about that, but let's look at the facts. This show dealt with the Apollo 14, and Apollo 15, landings. They tried to disprove the landing based on the currently available footage.

A man from Ohio was hired by local government to do a anniversary piece on the landing as a promotional piece. After long months of review and research, he decided there was room to say that the footage was faked. Apparently, 25% of Americans believe that we never went to the moon. The man who did the study also says that 400,000 NASA employees working on the lunar project were duped because the NASA system was already set up for simulation. You see, in order to prepare for the hazards of a lunar landing and astronauts on the moon's surface, they had a long prep time of simulations working through all the possible problems. The report indicated that all NASA had to do was shoot faked footage and stream it into the control room, thus convincing all 400,00 and every American that we'd gone to the moon when we hadn't.

Why would we do that? Theoretically because of the current (at that time) political cold war. We were in a space race, hoping to prove our world power. It was a power move to threaten other countries with how advanced we were.

I've seen other programs suggesting faked footage too. A couple of years ago, there was a show which interviewed the man who invented the chest-mounted cameras for the astronauts. He admits that there was no way his invention could have created the clarity of the pictures we see as historic landing shots. He showed an example and truthfully, they were not only grainy and fuzzy, they were also chest height and could not frame a shot. The photos from the moon are head height, well framed, and relatively clear for the time.

Other proof was that over the course of days, the astronauts were supposed to be showing different surfaces of the moon. However, the rock formations, sizes, distances from each other are identical in photos supposedly taken two days apart. One is merely flipped. Likewise, there was a single light source brought up, and the sun, making a second light source. There were no other lights used. Yet in some pictures, there are rock shadows showing THREE sources from multiple angles. Not possible. The landscape is said to be identical to that found at Area 51. I'm not so sure about that, but if you were worried that your secret hoax would be discovered, it would indeed make sense to use land that the general public was not provided access to.

Now in this most recent show of Fact or Faked, they provided alternate details. Dropping a feather and a hammer to show how it would fall at the same rate, is suggested to have been for the benefit of proving the astronauts were in a weightless environment. Thus non-suspecting Americans would be set-up to believe the following "lunar" footage. Fact or Faked showed that simply shoving a titanium wire in the shaft of the feather would cause it to drop at the same rate as the hammer, on earth.

After that footage, an astronaut leaps into the air with a salute. The journalist points out that there appears to be a fly-wire attached to the top of his pack. Likewise the film of one astronaut helping another one up from a kneeling position, appears unnatural...as though fly-wire lifted him and then the astronaut found his feet.

Here's my take on it. I don't think it's an all or nothing scenario. Why does it have to be that if the film footage was faked, therefore the lunar landing never happened? Why? Yeah, I get that NASA says they decided to save data storage space by DELETING all the original lunar footage is, to say the least, fishy. I get that being lied to translates to untrustworthiness.

Let's look at another possibility, shall we? Let's say that NASA did put men on the moon. Maybe all went according to plan, but as the inventor of the chest-mounted camera admits, the footage was unusable at best. If you were America, throwing millions into a space race project to show your awesome world power during the cold war, AND all of America knew what you were doing while expecting significant visual results, wouldn't you do the "oh shit" head slap when you couldn't prove you'd been there?

I think NASA had the head slap. They realized they were fucked, or would be fucked but couldn't do any better for the chest-mount cameras and therefore pre-planned earthbound footage to feed into the command center, and faked the filming of the lunar landing. That is to say, the film footage is faked, NOT the actual lunar landing.

I think NASA suspected they wouldn't get the footage proof they needed and therefore prepared some in that event. I think NASA used it as their proof when the original grade showed nothing usable and they had to destroy the original film, hoping they'd never be found out. Then they sealed it in a government envelope, never to be opened, so that the hoax would simply be accepted as reliable proof of what did occur there. No one is spilling the secrets, they are under a gag order or something.

Oh yeah, and in other news, I have a new contract for Faking Perfection over at Dreamspinner Press. I'll tell you more about it later. But, woo hoo!

2 comments:

Chris said...

Congrats on the new contract at DSP!!!

Unknown said...

Congrats on the new contract. I enjoy Fact or Faked. :)