Doesn't help that people were not randomly bouncing laser beams off the moon before the landings.
"so there exists a peculiar shiny field of obsidian rocks on the surface in that particular area, so what?"
If it were a religious claim that (fill in the blank) put a gold tablet up there, skepticism would be seen as healthy.
Personally I think the ham radio AMSAT guys should drop an active transponder on the moon, so EME antennas don't have to be so elaborate. Of course it would only work half the time and temperature cycles would be brutal on the poor thing, but still...
There is some weirdness with certain mountain peaks near the poles being in continuous sunlight. Great spot for a manned colony. Of course that is a lot different in scale from just dropping an unmanned AMSAT transponder.
It would be much easier to lunar orbit the device, although less cool than being on the surface. A reasonably low orbit could keep transmitting even in the shade.
It's not sufficient for the surface to be shiny. The retroreflector array needs a really specific configuration of mirrors to reflect incoming light from any direction back to it's source. That is rather unlikely to form naturally. Without that, it would only reflect the laser back to earth for a very small portion of moon's orbit, as it doesn't always point exactly to the same direction.
It's something of a technological anomaly. A few years back the Apollo program had been in complete shambles, burning the Apollo 1 astronauts to death. 30-40 years later, we are still crash landing probes into the surface of planets and blowing up space shuttles. But for a few years starting in 1969 we routinely soft landed a rocket on an unmapped alien surface, and then launched it again and docked with the command module orbiting at 3000 mph? It just doesn't seem to "fit".
I've seen enough historical examples to know that you CAN dupe most people most of the time.
Most people seem to be convinced by the "social proof". I really believe if it were the other way around, no one had heard of the moon landings, and you were going around telling people "no really, we landed on the moon, drove a car around on it and played golf!" ... that you would be completely ridiculed.
Anyway, not here to start a huge debate, just providing an answer to a question.
This video explains why: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGXTF6bs1IU
All true, and it would have been much, much harder to keep it all completely secret for decades. Virtually no secrets survive that long.
How do you know that? If a secret did last for decades, you wouldn't know about it.
I can actually give a couple counterexamples: two big government secrets that lasted 3 decades:
(1) A US bomber accidentally dropped a hydrogen bomb out of an airplane into the dessert near Albuquerque, New Mexico, triggering a conventional but non-nuclear detonation. This happened in 1957 but was kept secret until 1986 -- a span of 29 years. "It was only in 1986 when an Albuquerque newspaper published an account based on military documents recovered through the Freedom of Information Act." (ref: http://www.hkhinc.com/newmexico/albuquerque/doomsday/ )
(2) The British were regularly reading encrypted German messages by around 1940. The codebreaking of the German Enigma machine was one of the greatest secrets of World War 2, and the British shared the knowledge with the Americans. This secret was revealed in 1974--after 34 years--because of two books by key intelligence figures. (ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra#Post-war_disclosures )
In both cases, at least dozens of people--but more likely hundreds of people--would have been privy to the secrets.
I'm certainly not endorsing conspiracy theories about fake moon landings. I'm commenting only about the persistent meme that big secrets are quickly exposed: it's not necessarily true.
> How do you know that? If a secret did last for decades, you wouldn't know about it.
No, I meant secrets that quickly came out (that weren't secret for long), versus things that were only revealed after a long time. It's a reasonable yardstick for the degree that things can be kept secret "for decades", my claim.
Things that really have remained secret:
* Where Jimmy Hoffa's body is buried.
* What happened to Judge Crater (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Force_Crater)
* What women want. Freud famously asked. but no one knows, certainly not women. This may belong in a different category, since it's not clear that anyone knows the secret.
> A US bomber accidentally dropped a hydrogen bomb out of an airplane into the dessert near Albuquerque, New Mexico, triggering a conventional but non-nuclear detonation. This happened in 1957 but was kept secret until 1986
So that's in the never-revealed secrets column? Just checking.
> This secret [Enigma] was revealed in 1974--after 34 years--because of two books by key intelligence figures.
Actually, it was because of the British Official Secrets Act, that required silence on sensitive matters until the government granted permission, and that was obeyed by all concerned. The books were't simply published, after due consideration they were vetted by the authorities in advance of publication. That example belongs in the well-kept secrets act, because everyone involved obeyed the rules until given permission to do otherwise. If it had been a 50 year silence requirement, I suspect that it would still have been obeyed.
But I think you'll agree that rare exceptions don't disprove rules.
> I'm commenting only about the persistent meme that big secrets are quickly exposed: it's not necessarily true.
Not "quickly exposed", that's not a position I took. Thirty or forty years is sufficient validation for my original claim.
Er, no, we didn't. Before we started landing people on the moon, we sent a series of unmanned mapping missions to the moon so that we wouldn't be trying to land on an unmapped alien surface. [1]
In the middle of the cold war.
Where the line is between fake and real? Was it the entire Apollo program or just the six landings? Obviously there has been some space travel by humans at the time. In your view how far did we get before faking the rest? Did we just stop with Gemini and say 'screw it the rest is too hard'?
I can acknowledge that it seems superficially anomalous to have people flying to the moon using slide rules, but it's not like NASA just pointed a finger and decided to go. There were a number of steps along the way where each step makes sense compared to the next one. If Apollo 8-10 were real, then 11 seems entirely plausible.