TV Alert: Mythbusters and the Moon Hoax Myth

[/caption]

On Wednesday August 27th, at 9 p.m. ET/PT in the US, the famed “Mythbusters” on the Discovery Channel will take on one of the biggest myths ever: the belief the Apollo Moon landings were faked. Some folks who lived through the 1960’s never believed the moon landings actually happened, and some how this belief persisted. In 2001 the Fox Channel aired a show “Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon?” and the belief grew. But now the Mythbusters take on the HB’s (hoax believers) who say they have scientific evidence the moon landings were faked. Adam and Jamie will fight bad science with their usual good science. The results? We’ll have to wait and see until tonight. But here’s a preview:

I can’t wait!

For more info:
Mythbusters website.
Article on CollectSpace about the show, includes quotes from Phil Plait
Phil Plait’s Review of the show and links to his previous articles about the show
Phil’s debunking of the Fox moon hoax show

36 Replies to “TV Alert: Mythbusters and the Moon Hoax Myth”

  1. If people landed on the moon why didn’t they detect the crystal sphere shattering?

  2. The HBs still wont believe it though. And Im sure when I check this site tommorrow there will be some moron who still doesnt think we ever landed on the moon.

  3. Something like that.
    Problem is no ones actually sent space hardware fine tuned for investigating the Apollo moon landing sites.
    They wouldn’t bother to waste a moon shot on what amounts to a history field trip, and the moon landings are already accepted as fact by all but the chemtrail crowd.

    Even if they did, conspiracy theorists would just say that evidence is faked too. Just as they are probably blogging now about how the CIA put mythbusters up to this…

  4. This always reminds me of the movie “Dumb and Dumber” when Jim Cary’s character realizes few decades later that we landed on the moon. 🙂
    and it always cracks me up.

    Joe.

  5. I laugh at the ignorance of some people. “OMG THE MOON LANDING WAS FAKE!” Yeah right. Ignorance is not bliss.

    Hell, I doubt that many of the “visual effects” seen in the moon landing video would have been possible back in the movie studios of the 1960s.

  6. To David: It was some time in 1969 I believe. (I’m assuming you’re not being sarcastic.)

  7. If it was fake, i am sure the USSR would have noticed something fishy about the moon landing and could have discredit the US for beating them to the Moon.

    Joe

  8. It looks like they are debunking a specific subset of the myth, that the documentary and video footage was faked on a soundstage. I suspect that what they are going to do is show that recreating those photos is much harder than it looks.

    In my view this is easily debunked given the state of radio signal intelligence in the years before the Apollo missions going back to WWI. The Americans were routinely using EME communication in the 50s, and the Russians were using radio telescopes to take low-resolution images of Venus. Radio signal intelligence was relatively cheap, low-risk, and required only vacuum tube technology.

    Anything with a transmitter that made Earth orbit was triangulated and tracked from launch to reentry by both superpowers, a host of allies and neutral powers. Dozens of countries eavesdropped on the missions including the Soviets we were supposed to “fool.”

  9. As my son just said “How could you fake a rocket liftoff?”

    The Hoax Believers are ALL lunatics. Driven mad by the Moon… 😉

  10. 1969? Why, it’s the first I’ve heard of it. I’m going mad, mad I tell you. Driven mad by the moon. The moon, why yes, the moon itself is a hoax. It simply doesn’t exist. It’s a figment of my imagination. Solipsists of the world unite!

  11. With how much the Russians and other nations wanted to harsh our moment in the spotlight, and how far they had infiltrated our intelligence system and every level of American government, I’ve always had a hard time believing moon landings were anything but real.

    It would have been incredibly damaging to the west if they could even have pulled off the insinuation of such a thing with a strait face.

  12. 1) First, a quibble: The use of “myth” and “mythology” to mean such things as “delusion” and “fantasy” is wide of the mark. For most of human history, what we now call “myths” were elegant ways of passing information about history and the world to the generations to come that were likely to be remembered and acted on appropriately if similar things happened in the future. We *really* need to find another word to cover idiot conspiracy theories and that sort of thing.

    2) That said, conspiracy theorizing is a social disease, and those who collect and create such theories are as addicted to them as any heroin addict is to his favorite poison — maybe it’s the adrenaline rush that engaging in the game of conspiracy theory seems to generate. Like the man said, you’ll never get conspiracy theorists to give up their intellectual addiction of choice with sweet reason. Only an out-of-left-field sort of tactic will do, like telling them, “That’s okay — we’ll go to the Moon, and Mars, and all the way to the stars, and you can stay here and rot, if that’s what you want. Less competition for us to deal with, and all of that.” (“No war was ever won by fighting clean.” — Marine Corps DI) Scientists are very logical — but when it comes to human politics (and dealing with conspiracy freaks is *very* political, not the least reason for which is the fact that the mainstream media *and* the marginal media just lap that stuff up and ask for more), you need something more than that: savvy. Savvy about human emotions, what rings others’ bells, the sort of things that reach people when reason won’t. “But that’s not *fair* — I chose to become a scientist, not a politician!” Yeah, well, tough. If you want to win this or any other culture war, you’ll have to be both. Humans are very adaptable — it’s not an impossible task.

  13. About time someone challenged these idiots.
    But it will make no difference.
    Its a sad comment on the lack of intelligence on this planet…

  14. Soooo…if it’s fake, are other nations using the same stage setup…being that USA’s remains from our visit have been photographed in THEIR shots ON the MOON?

    I look forward to this episode of Mythbusters, though it won’t help the insane out there with their unsupportable claims.

    I mean seriously, we can shoot a laser to reflective mirrors setup there and give the exact distance in inches. Never been to the moon…pft.

  15. Adam: “This is not a real spacesuit… this is just my wear around town spacesuit”
    *closes visor*

    …Now I’m jealous >_>

  16. The arguments I read so far are: the USSR WOULD have noticed…
    I DOUBT vissual effects would have been possible….
    how could you fake a rocket liftoff…

    is this your evidence that it is 100% true? you CAN fake the liftoff and NOT go to the moon.

    Personally I think they went to the moon.
    Wheter or not the told everything they discovered remains a mystery.

    The problem with Mythbusters is: the only proof we need is an ACTUAL photograph of the landing site. Like the photo taken of the Phoenix on Mars (where you can see it descending and on the ground). When you can make photographs like that on Mars, you can also make that resolution pics of the moon. Only I have not seen those.
    So the programm is not going to help debukn this, because they are trying to let us see if they COULD faked it, and Mythbusters will show no actual proof.

  17. Didn’t Jaxa recently show images of the blast drift where one of the Apollo’s landed, but the resolution wasn’t quite enough to show a module ??

    I’m sure I read that somewhere ? My memory being what it is, it may not have been JAXA, it may have been ESA and it may not have been the moon .. and wait, where am I ?

    Cheers,
    al

  18. Like others have said, it doesn’t matter what evidence you present, people will believe what they want to believe. I’ve seen people rebuke the “not even the Russians deny the landings” argument by saying that the entire Cold War was a conspiracy, with the US and USSR staging it all to keep the military money flowing or some such nonsense. When LRO returns pictures of the landing sites, they’ll just claim that those pictures too were doctored. There’s just no way to reason with these people, because their belief is beyond reason.

  19. One small step for mankind, one giant leap for mankind

    I would say somthing like this if I was the first men to land on the moon.

    I dont think anybody can say something like this when they are in a place or situation that makes your heart beat like never before.

    Instead you coldn’t find words and would go like this.

    wowww this is amaizing, so big, I can’t believe i’m walking on the moon, incredeble,… simple things lake these

    But to come up with a shakespear, is probebly a studies script, just like in the movies.

    But im not saying i believe but i’m also not saying i don’t believe.

    If I know mankind good enough from history, we should be living on the moon by now, because when we set foot somewhere where never befour man passed. We like to concour it asap and in the years to come. we build a city on it.

    Whats on the moon today?

  20. Okay, no wind in space means no flag blowing in the wind. They say that there were metal poles in the flag to help it stay up, but when the Apollo took off from the surface, the flag flapped like mad as if there were no poles in it. And the Apollo brings up another point, they ran out of fuel landing on the moon. So if this is true, how did they get back off of the moon?

  21. So…NASA was and is I guess in the business of making movies, then showing them to the world in real time. Like that kid said how do you fake a rocket lauch? And..what happened to all that money they spent? If this was a hoax, it is the best pull off ever. Even Hollywood should be jealous of it. Oh bye the way Elvis isn’t dead, he is in Joan Rivers and trying to get out.

  22. Joe M-
    The thrusters on the Apollo ship blew the flag — even in a vacuum, thrusters thrust and create a force — that’s how the ship lifed off, and that’s what blew the flag. As for the fuel, there were two separate fuel tanks — one for landing and one for lift off. That way they couldn’t deplete all the fuel just on landing — which would have meant there would be no way to leave the moon.

  23. Drat! I am really …upset. The article that notified me of this TV show came out on the August 28 issue of Universe Today. I just read it, at 8:15, August 28, 2008. I really, really would have appreciated seeing this show, not because I don’t believe in the Moon landings, but because there are sooo many who do and this would bone up my arguments when I discuss the issue with them, I would have loved to see it. Is there going to be a repeat performance? Someone please email me at John a m darnell Att gmail dot commm. (Please remove spaces and change obvious words to their respective characters and/or correct spelling.)

  24. I can’t believe that this urban legend simply won’t go away. In my view it should be lumped into these other nutty society collections:

    Jim Morrison (of the Doors) did not die.
    Adolph Hitler survives to this day on a mountaintop villa in the Andes
    Elvis did not die and has been seen flipping fried sandwhiches at a remote diner in the Ozarks.
    Michael Jackson is a human being.
    Paul McCartney of today is a faked double.
    President Kennedy survived having his head blown apart but was shipped out of the country for unknown reasons.

    The moon landing fake crowd has an insatiable desire to eat up bad science and endless X-files “what if’s”. It is just sad and pathetic in my view.

  25. I can’t wait till they go over the bible on that show. I can only hope that that murderous deity of the bible Jumps the Shark in my lifetime.

  26. Are the moon landing conpiracy theorists in the same group of people that think NASA is trying to turn Saturn into a second Sun?

    I hate being associated as a human being along with those theorists. Dullards!!!! Dullards, I tell you!!

  27. How many folks believe we didn’t go to the moon? 18? 36? Maybe 120 at the outside? With so much else going on in science, is this a wise use of TV time?

  28. How inconsistent that it is not claimed that Apollo 8 or the Surveyors were fakes also! The landings can be considered the last steps in a development including the Surveyors landing on the moon and Apollo 8 orbiting the moon among many others. Every prior step made the next one possible. Steady progress since disastrous Apollo 1 makes clear that every next step was a consequence of the prior one. It makes no sense to doubt Apollo 11, if the Apollos before are not doubted also.

  29. Bill: Well, as with most things, “TV Time” is allocated according to viewer ratings and advertising dollars. A show dedicated to Moon Hoax Conspiracies doesn’t seem that weird for a show that also showcases the unrealistic aspects of pirate and heist movies.

  30. Ha, Everyone knows the moon is not REAL….. That thing you think you see in the sky is just part of the conspiracy….. They have faked that too….. 🙂

  31. I encourage everyone to really take a little bit of time and investigate whether we really landed on the moon. There is plenty of web sites dedicated to this topic on the net. I believe all of you will be surprised with what you find and what you can easily conclude. Those spacecraft never left low earth orbit (~200 miles above earth). If you still believe otherwise, you are in deep denial.

Comments are closed.