A miscellany of bits and pieces debunking tired old crap and utter stupidity.

An April Fool’s joke got posted claiming alien what-nots on the moon and secret stuff.  People believe it. Here’s why they shouldn’t (Spoiler alert: it’s bullshit)

A Lunar Orbiter photograph from 1967 is claimed to show a road and a UFO parked in a crater. It’s bollocks.

UFO nuts think NASA is hiding alien bases in Zeeman crater. They’re idiots.

Syfy channel’s “Aliens on the moon: the truth exposed’ has more bullshit than a field full of beef cattle. Read why here.

Alex Collier claims alien space beings told him sooper seekrit stuff, like “there’s a hole in the north pole and a NASA photo proves it”. My alien contacts tell me he’s full of it.

Hoax nuts love the story that Apollo astronauts gave a fake moon rock to a Dutch dignitary. Unfortunately for them it’s just not true.

Maansteen Apollo 20 - Mona Lisa Manilius Silliness Zeeman Stains SyFy Fiction Collier Wobbles

They’re everywhere. The stupid. Some of them walk among us, but the rest stay inside making up shite to put on the internet. The rest of this page is for one-off observations made by the stupid, dedicated to pointing out to the stupid that they are wrong, and stupid, one bit at a time.

This idiot a) thinks this is an Apollo astronaut’s description. It isn’t, as he should know because he got it here and b) doesn’t know that Starry Night is a piece of astronomy software.

The description’s wrong, it was actually taken some time after LOI, as detailed here.

He compounds his error later by saying this:

“ in a later interview, Neil Armstrong said, "we couldn't see any stars from cis-lunar space" and that is just a flat out lie”.

Nope. He never said that.

The same user (who claims to work for the CNSA but really doesn’t) claims to have worked out that the sun angles for Apollo, and says Apollo 12’s is all wrong.

Well, he had no need to work out, they’re all here.

Apollo 12 may have had a sun elevation of 18.6 degrees when they left for home, but when that photo was taken during EVA-1, not long after its start, so the sun elevation is nearer 6 degrees, not 18.


Starry Night fail

Sun elevation fail

Moon boot fail

This one gets posted a lot, so it’s not fair to pick on one individual loser for posting it without doing the tiniest amount of research.

The pattern is made by the overshoe, worn over the suit. This page does a thorough debunk of it.

Death Bed Confession

A video claims there is a death bed confession of Apollo 11’s staging. One problem: it’s a lie.

Low Hanging Fruit

Unhappy Astronauts fail

Another example of an actual lie that gets thrown around a lot.

Both of the alleged ‘before’ photographs are actually post-mission shots in the Mobile Quarantine facility. The ‘after’ shot is cherry-picked from the Apollo 11 press conference, where some tired astronauts are plonked on a stage in front of the world’s press. How happy would you be?

Hoaxtards usually miss out the happy shots from the conference, like the one below.

Flag Fail

Michael James Myers thinks the Apollo 11 flag was deployed too soon.

He claims, here, that you can see it reflected in the LM window before it was deployed live on TV to an audience of most of the planet with access to a TV.

Two small problems. One, its not the flag - it’s a piece of card inside the LM combined with the Landing Point Designator markings on the window. Two, the flag could not possibly have been visible in that window.

Below left is the LM interior showing the LPD on the left (CDR) window as we look at it. It does not appear on the right window. The card hanging down is clearly in line with the window.

Below centre is a view of the flag and LM as well as the window in question. The flag is not visible from that window. All photographs of the flag from inside the LM are taken from the other (LMP) window. Below right is the flag, notice the window we need to see is not visible at all.

It’s not the flag.

Photography fail

Michael James Myers again, this time with an issue over this photo. He thinks its too dark, when all the other photographs are lighter.

Leaving aside the fact that several other photos are also dark, if only there was some way of, oh I don’t know - maybe actually researching this stuff to see if there was an explanation? How about the Mission Report?

So, as is clearly documented, 1/250 was the standard exposure, the ladder shots were longer exposure.

The reason it’s dark is because the photographer is standing completely in the shade, and hasn’t used the correct setting.

It proves nothing other than his lack of knowledge about basic photography and the mission records.

Photoshop fail

This bright spark has been hard at work looking at LRO images of Earth.

Look, he says, evidence of Photoshop!! He uploaded this file to here. Let’s have a look at that image.

Last time I looked through a telescope there weren’t any labels. Can you think how those labels might have got there? Can you? If only there was some sort of software that would do it…

The fact is that India and China have imaged Apollo 14’s site and found evidence of human activity. The fact is that you can download the raw LRO files and look at them yourself. You might need Photoshop to look at them though.

Nasascam Nonsense & Truth Party lies

The Nasascam & Truth Party websites are full of absolute garbage trying to prove the landings were hoaxed. This is an unfinished work in progress debunking that garbage.

Ex-Pat Twatty

Expat Taffy thinks he’s brilliant. He’s not. He’s a deluded idiot who sees things that aren’t there. This is an unfinished page looking at some of his stupid. There’s just too much of it to finish.

Tracking Stations Fail

Our favourite fake pretend scientist is at it again, this time making a number of claims about the stations used to track Apollo.

He’s absolutely right about the MSFN and DSN, they were actually a thing and did good work. He’s also correct about the Soviet equivalent. The ESA one, not so much. The ESA wasn’t founded until 1975.

The claim that they were all in cahoots, particularly an organisation that didn’t exist, is just a fantasy he needs to prop his delusion.

Then there’s the idea that they were top secret facilities manned by the military.

Nope, wrong again. Some stations did have military personnel, but many were manned by a variety of civilian contract staff. This National Geographic edition describes how:

“"travelling teachers, a chaplain, even an island hopping barber"

would service the stations, along with employees of companies like Bendix, Boeing and RCA.

This article by a self-confessed ‘Range Rat’, describes his fellow rats at Tananarive station in Madagascar as

“high-tech army of migrant workers”

and himself as:

“Fresh out of school and possessing a near-fanatical devotion to the space program”

Certainly not a member of the military. You can look at Tananarive here to see how very military it isn’t.

This Spanish tracking station director talks about being the

“interface between the NASA station management and the local Spanish contractor employees”

and describes himself as a “contractor”. Again, no mention of the military.

Likewise the staff at Australia’s tracking stations at Honeysuckle Creek, made famous in the film ‘The Dish’.

Yes, NASA used the military, why wouldn’t it? The tracking stations of many countries were, however, run by civilian agencies just like NASA, and were not top secret or off limits to non-military personnel.

The poster in question needs this secret military network to exist in order to prop up his fantasy. The reality is that the signals from Apollo spacecraft came from the moon, not orbiting craft that would have required a constant handover to the next station. Far from being “in on the hoax”, the staff at these stations were immensely proud of being involved, like Don Kovalchik:

“I cherished my role; I'd helped NASA maneuver satellites, talk to astronauts, and retrieve untold gigabytes of scientific data.”

Or Valeriano Claros-Guerra

“the astronauts were just getting ready to exit the lunar lander when I finished [my shift], so there was no way I was going home”

Another combination of poor research and delusional fantasy colliding to try and re-write history.

Click here to look at some of my tracking station memorabilia.

Flat Earth Fuckwit

A particularly dumb facebook group (Nasa Hoax) hosts a wide variety  of window licking retards, and one of them posted this gem of a video, also available on tiktok.

It claims to be “leaked” Apollo 11 footage. Leaked? Sure, if broadcasting it live on TV and having it all over the newspapers counts.

It also claims to show flat Earth, when in fact (as we can see on this page) it shows nothing of the sort, it shows part of a live broadcast featuring a hurricane on a globe Earth. The only flat thing about it is the flat out lie it’s telling.

Why are they doing this? Hmm…let’s have a look at the website it’s supposedly from.

These people don’t want you to know the truth, they want you to pay for their lies.

Kubrick: Lies wide shut

There’s a video that crops up from time to time purportedly showing Stanley Kubrick on the Apollo landing set. IT doesn’t, and it looks like the joke’s on landing deniers.

Shadow Shite

This bright spark thinks the flag has a shadow going in the opposite direction to Aldrin’s. For some reason he thinks the big chunky shadow heading from hear the base of the flag to the left of the photo is the thin flag pole.

If only he’d checked other photos available to him, like this one showing the solar wind collector, and the flag shadow. Or if he’d zoomed in to find the actual flagpole shadow.

Butthead


“Willis Butts”, admin of a particularly stupid facebook group and owner of the “truth Party” website (oh the irony of that name) is a flat Earth science denying moron.

He thinks the people who like his posts are morons too, or he wouldn’t post crap like this.

None of these photographs are at Langley.

The top one is part of the “Making of…” footage of the film ‘First Man’.

Bottom left is Wernher von Braun, photographed on an exhibit at the Atlanta State Fair in September 1969. See here for a press photo of the event.

The other two are both taken from the film ‘Moonwalkers’, made in 2016. See here for more debunking of that kind of thing.

Artemissed it

To be fair, it’s a reasonable question. To be unfair, no source is given for who claimed it was taken by the Artemis 1 mission, but had he done some research he’d have discovered it’s actually an Apollo 17 image. The veracity of that image is proven here.

So the reason it looks like an Apollo image isn’t to fake Artemis, it’s because it’s an Apollo image, taken decades before any kind of CGI was capable of producing it.

As for the lack of dark shadows on the lunar surface, the crescent Earth should tell you that the sun is shining directly on to the surface we’re looking at.

That crescent isn’t from the moon’s shadow, idiot, it’s from the sun 93 million miles way.

Luna lies

This contributor to the ‘The Moon-Landing Hoax’ facebook group makes a bold claim, using the data in the table on the right, taken from this page.

Is Neelam being dumb or dishonest? Or both?

Firstly, the Soviet missions are not overlooked - they were widely reported at the time and are the subject of many books and magazine articles. The entire space race was a response to their efforts - it’s hardly a mystery no-one knows about. I have 4 or 5 books on it.

Secondly, Pioneer and Ranger were not soft landing missions. Their entire aim was to hit the moon hard. The Surveyor programme was a soft-landing mission, but of the 7 only two crashed - the other five were very successful indeed. I have the reports from them.

Finally there’s the third ‘fact’ - the success rate of the sample return programme. There were indeed 11 attempts at it, with only 3 successes. However, only 4 of those attempts actually made it to the moon, and only one of those failed on the surface (it fell over). The other failures all occurred either on the launch pad or by failing to leave Earth orbit. All this is something that could have been discovered by scrolling just a tiny bit further down the page. Likewise the ‘success’ rate of the soft-landers (ie, not intended to return) is quoted on the Wiki page as 15.4%, but 7 of the 13 attempts failed at the Earth end, not the moon. Two of the remaining 6 landed successfully, making it a 1 in 3 success rate for those that managed to leave Earth (the others either hit the ground hard or flew straight past).

Something else they could have discovered with a little work is that the sample returns did not rendezvous in lunar orbit with another craft - they took a direct route, achieving escape velocity from the ground. Again, looking at the data on that same page the USSR had more success in the 1970s than they did when they were directly competing with the USA.

The USSR demonstrated many times that travelling to (and back from) the moon, including with live cargo, was perfectly possible - all you needed was to get off the ground, something that they weren’t that good at thanks to the political pressure to launch before they were ready, and to try and bend rocket science to fit Communist Party dogma.

Cherry-picked, poorly researched ‘analysis’ doesn’t help your cause, it just makes you look dishonest.  

Camera Shy

It’s difficult to tell sometimes whether Willis Butts, aka Frank Goodman (see also this page) is genuinely this stupid, deliberately deceptive, or enjoys making his sycophants at his NASA Hoax facebook group look like drooling slack-jawed morons.

In this really piss poor meme, he claims that there is no camera visible, and you never see Aldrin’s leg extended in the footage.

As you can see on the left below, however, the TV camera is right there, on the MESA, from where it filmed both astronauts as they descended.

If he’d bothered to watch that TV footage, like this footage here, he’d notice (at just after the 21 minute mark) the ghostly figure of Aldrin’s boot swing out and back again. Armstrong is in the distance, photographing the scene.

Dig your own hole

In another classic own goal, Goodman posts this image as proof that Apollo 11 was faked.

Except this is a still from the behind the scenes footage from the making of ‘First Man’.

The ‘Papier Mache’ is no such thing, it’s actual landscape from the location of the Armstrong biopic’s film set, Vulcan Quarry in Stockbridge Atlanta. It was edited out of the film, because Tranquility Base looked nothing like that.


Putting your foot in it

Again, Frank has to know just how much of a lie he’s telling here. His meme claims that Aldrin couldn’t have taken this photo, because his camera was chest mounted. They could be chest mounted, but they could also be detached, as can seen in the 16mm footage of the exact moment the footprint photo was taken (left of frame).

As for the image he uses, it was actually taken in a studio, because it’s a still from ‘First Man’, not the actual photo. He must know that.

Taking the rise

This Apollo 11/12 earthrise meme is doing the rounds, promoted by people who are too stupid and/or lazy to double check their facts before making themselves look dumb.

This idiot doubles down on the stupid by adding some extra. Firstly, the reason the clouds in the Apollo 11 and ‘12’ images are the same is because they are both Apollo 11 (AS11-44-6553 & AS11-44-6561), no-one ever claimed it was Apollo 12 apart from the liar who made the meme. Apollo 12’s Earthrise photos are completely different (see here).

Secondly, Apollo 9 never went anywhere near the moon - it was an Earth orbit mission testing LM and CSM docking procedures.

Thirdly, there is no Apollo 13 image there, but there is an Apollo 10 Earthrise (bottom left, AS10-27-3891). All the rest are Apollo 11.

Finally, photoshop did not exist when these photos were taken.

If you’ve paid any attention to this website at all will know that every image of Earth can be verified by looking at the weather satellite images taken on the same day. They aren’t fake, they aren’t photoshopped.

The only people telling lies here are the moon hoax believers.

Dust, anyone?

Aww look, it’s everyone’s favourite canteen cleaner in China again.

First off, he fails to disclose the actual causes of failure of the probes he mentions. India’s Vikram probe failed after its braking thrusters malfunctioned 4.5 miles up. Israel’s Beresheet suffered multiple malfunctions, not least of which was the engine shutting down thanks to the way they chose to fix other errors. Japan’s privately funded Hakuto lander ran out of fuel. None of these have anything to do with dust or exhaust plumes.

As for his claim that Apollo’s landers didn’t create any exhaust plumes oir kick up dust during landing, well firstly, he has no idea about the plumes as they weren’t filmed. It matters not, you don’t need a rocket to produce a visible flame in order for it to work.

Secondly, maybe he missed the famous “picking up a little dust” comment during Apollo 11’s landing, or the videos taken by 16mm cameras of the other missions that clearly show exactly that: dust being sent off in a way that couldn’t be done on Earth. The videos below show the landing footage for all Apollo missions, all showing streams of dust being blown horizontally by the engine exhaust that he claims isn’t there.

As for blast craters, it’s a common obsession with hoaxnuts. They don’t get that if it was firing hard enough to gouge out a huge hole, the descent engine would just fire the LM back into space. All the missions show discoloured, denuded surfaces immediately below the engine bell.

It’s kind of ironic that a Chinese lander is illustrating his post, because the landing footage from those landers (also given below) shows dust behaving exactly as it does in the Apollo footage, shows no visible exhaust and no blast craters.

Oops.

Apollo 11

Apollo 12

Apollo 14

Apollo 15

Apollo 16

Apollo 17

Chang’e-3

Chang’e-4

Wheely stupid

One of the most consistently stupid questions asked, after “where are the stars?” is “how did they fit the rover inside the lunar module?”.

The answer, to anyone who cares to do a fraction of a tiny amount of checking is “they didn’t, you fucking idiot”.

The rover was folded up and stored in an empty quadrant during flight.

 Everyone’s favourite cleaner steps in with an answer, clearly trying present himself as an expert in the subject, but merely ends up showing that he knows absolutely nothing and is just winging it. Because he sounds convincing, people believe him.

He claims that there is a door that opens and turns into a ramp.

This video, and the diagrams from historical documents freely available to anyone who cares to check, show that what he thinks is a ‘door’ is the base of the rover. There is no ramp. The rover is pulled from its storage location, the wheels pop out on springs and the whole assembly is lowered to the ground. It’s then driven away to have its other components fitted.

In a later reply, he acknowledges the dust plumes created by China’s lander, but it’s not quite the dust storm he imagines. While that article quotes scientists as saying

“LADEE also has the potential to measure dust that might be lofted above the lunar surface by the Chang'e 3 touchdown”

And that China’s probe might consequently have an impact on LADEE’s results, reports after the event found that

“Surprisingly, the LADEE science teams' preliminary evaluation of the data has not revealed any effects that can be attributed to Chang'e 3”

Oops. Again.

Probe Analysis

Here’s another regular on the Moon Landing Hoax group that likes to sound as if she knows what she’s talking about, but really doesn’t. In this example we have a photo from this report showing photographs taken by the Surveyor 3 probe. Because it doesn’t look like the photos taken by Apollo 12, Apollo 12 didn’t go. Simple, right?

Wrong.

Neelam is either very careful about her image selection, or isn’t familiar with the contents of mag 48. As it turns out, she’s just parroting claims made elsewhere without checking.

If she’d looked beyond AS12-48-7136 and AS12-48-7091, she might not have been so quick to fall for it.

A key part missing from the photo is the bit in the report that says it’s a 13m wide crater. That same crater is described later as being on the north-east rim. Neelam seems think the blocks are right next to Surveyor.

These two photos are looking to the north west, so are there any looking in the right direction? Yes. Quite a few, like AS12-48-7103. 7103 shown below, with a zoom into the relevant area to the right.

Oh dear. It’s an exact match, right down to the smallest rock. On the horizon you can make out the same three rocks. In the foreground the brightly lit pointed rock can be seen on the left side of the Reseau cross. The angular rocks immediately behind the pointed one, and the line of rocks on the left are also easy to make out. Once you get your bearings it’s easy to navigate your way round the image and pick out identical features.

Having found a photo with all the rocks in, it’s a little strange that it’s a cropped version of AS12-48-7091 - had she seen the full sized picture, she’d have noticed, in the top right corner, the rocks that are very obviously the ones in the Surveyor image. I’ve shown it on the right here.

Odd that. Almost as if it was done on purpose…

Despite the protestations of the page admin, however, it’s very very clear proof that both photographs were taken on the moon, and that once again a lack of knowledge about the images, unwillingness to double check whether their claims are stupid or not, and not seeing the downright dishonesty in image editing, have been exposed very quickly.

Putting a foot in it

Here’s another claim being made about Surveyor, this time about the distribution of lunar soil on the footpad photographed by Apollo.

In case it isn’t clear from the screenshots, the claim is that there is far too much soil on the footpad in the Apollo picture compared with Surveyor’s own.

Even allowing for the slightly biased way he’s drawn his lines, it’s obviously true. So, how come?

The key, as is often the case, is incomplete knowledge and research.


The photograph he’s used was taken on Day 110 of Surveyor’s mission, and the photo can be seen on page 151 of this report. From day 118 onwards, however, we have photographs in the report showing that more dirt had been deposited, and partially removed, from the footpad (see below).

If we zoom in to a detailed version of the Apollo photo (right) and image 141, we can even identify individual lumps of the soil. It’s a clear match.

Again we have someone who has looked no further than a photograph that confirms their bias in reaching their conclusion, rather than investigating whether there are better explanations for what they see other than “a stage hand messed up”.

Update: Fair play to Neelam, she’s now acknowledged her error. The original picture in her post has been replaced (but not with the full version of the original one posted).

There’s no retraction of the original claim though, which is a pity.

Halo

Neelam makes another contribution to facebook with the post on the right here.

It’s referencing claims by fascist warmonger Putin’s space puppet that he hadn’t seen any conclusive evidence of Apollo. He’s full of shitski, but she takes offence at Twitter’s fact-checkers referencing a halo observed by JAXA’s orbital probe around Apollo 15’s landing site.

She has, apparently, looked really really hard at the Apollo 15 photos and hasn’t managed to find any discolouration..

There’s a reason for this - the halo isn’t something you’re going to see from close up. The LM exhaust, thanks to the lack of atmosphere, is a very diffuse plume - it covers a wide area. It’s not going to be easy to see the effect unless you’re very high up. This video explains it superbly.

Here are two papers, one from JAXA, the other about Chandrayaan-1’s observations of the same effect. They even reference change in surface reflectivity see in Apollo 15 orbital images from before and after the landing and a sighting of Apollo hardware. Even the command module pilot talks about it, and we know he’s in lunar orbit.

Disappointed in not seeing any halo in surface images, she shows a picture taken by the USSR’s Lunokhod-1.

She doesn’t give a source for it, but it’s from this.

Nowhere in that paper does it claim regolith disturbance by the Soviet lander (just the rover). Nowhere does it mention a blast crater or discolouration. She’s making that assumption herself using a low resolution TV image.

The paper does make several references to Apollo though, almost as if the authors are happy that it happened.

It’s also arguably not the best quality version of that photo - have another one from here.

Notice the lack of dust in the footpad. Notice the obvious presence of loose material on the surface close to the engine. Just like in Apollo photos.

There is a small crater, but there’s no way to tell if it’s directly under the engine bell or if it was there before. Claiming there is no LM there because there is no halo visible on the ground, but there is an unmanned vehicle there because she thinks she can see one in a TV image is a non-sequitur.

There are also many photos taken of scorched ground under LM engines, but the proximity of this one to the ground, the relatively bright conditions when their photos of the bell were taken, and the fact that they shut the engine off further up than most missions means you are less likely to see them close up.

Her spin on Rogozin’s claims is also a little dishonest - he does not claim that no evidence exists. He has claimed that he hasn’t seen anything that convinces him. That is not the same thing at all. She is equally unconvinced despite all the evidence on offer, but her opinion is no more correct than his.

Crossed wires

So much to pick over here. First of all, Graham’s appeal to his own authority doesn’t work when he has no apparent expertise in photography. He’s wrong about the Reseau crosses, they were not imposed after they were taken, they were part of the film magazines of cameras used on the surface.

Far from being of poor quality, there are many superb photographs taken with one of the best cameras - it’s a frequent claim by reality deniers that the photos are ‘too good’. Make your minds up people.


China’s favourite adopted son may have ‘looked into the issue a bit’, but he hasn’t learned anything. NASA didn’t up load new images in 2010, nor were they photoshopped. The Project Apollo Flickr archive has nothing to do with NASA.

No cross hairs were added, removed or augmented in any way, what you see is entirely a product of the way light has interacted with the film.

The entire Apollo photograph archive has been available for decades, there is no difference between any images published in terms of their content.

Quality? Sure, depends on the source, but nothing in the photographs is any different. Prove me wrong.

Caspar Calamity

This poster’s response to some Apollo 16 photographs (with no explanation other than a cryptic reference to Dmitry Rozogin) shows the usual lack of knowledge about Apollo and it’s equipment.

Firstly, as is pointed out to him, there is direct reference to the damage - it was spotted on the TV broadcast of lift off (screenshot included)- it’s the reason those photographs exist:

177:12:20 Irwin: Okay. John, looking at the pictures of the liftoff, it appeared that something might have come loose - skin on the - the back of the vehicle so, for that reason, we want Ken to take some pictures of the LM

177:16:47 Mattingly: Some of the stuff is torn - a couple of panels are torn off. And some of the stripping in between it is - it looks like it was struck by something, but it looks like all the mylar blankets underneath are still intact.

As usual a lack of actual research lets someone down. Instead of admitting that, they double down on it which brings us to…

Secondly, the LM is shortly to be docked, unloaded and discarded, it’s work is pretty much done - and working it very obviously is. The crew are wearing their space suits, so don’t need to worry too much about leaks. The visual inspection showed only superficial damage to the outer cladding - you know, the stuff hoaxtards are constantly bitching about just being cardboard and duct tape. They aren’t worried because all their instrumentation and inspections give them no reason to.

Tied up in knots

Another one from everyone’s favourite pretend space worker. This time he’s showing his ignorance on yet another area of the missions.

He’s deriding a post criticising one of his supposed ‘12 smoking guns’ (below right), a piece of Apollo 15 footage from the LRV deployment.

First off, there’s no suggestion anywhere that the astronaut is tethered in any way - his claim is entirely bogus and based on the astronaut’s movement in lunar gravity. There is no rope anywhere, other than the lanyard used to deploy the rover.

His main error here, however, is his dismissal of the idea that tethers were ever used.

Thanks to diligent research and looking into actual facts, it is well known that Armstrong was tethered to the lunar module as he made his first step. The tether in question was the Lunar Equipment Conveyor, the line used to transfer things to and form the lunar surface, but which was initially used to keep Armstrong attached just in case something went terribly wrong.

It can be made out in TV footage and is even shown in training photos.




The C-Rock Crock

There’s a lot of nonsense spouted about a rock with letter on it. This page has a look at it in more dxetail.

Mannequin shenanigan

He’s back, and this time he’s claiming that the figure standing at the rear of the rover in these 4 photos at station 1 on Apollo 17’s first EVA is a dummy, and that it doesn’t move at all, not one single bit, in this panorama taken by Jack Schmitt. He acknowledges that there are differences, but it can only possibly be due to camera movement, not astronaut.

Well, if that’s the case, if we get Photoshop to align the 4 photos, there should be a consistent movement with everything else, right?

Seems not!

Pay particular attention to what’s visible in the visor - despite the rover wheel moving very little, the visor itself and what it shows reflected changes a lot.

He is, quite simply, seeing what he wants to see, not what’s actually there.

Blue Marble Madness

I’m not sure what’s more depressing - the fact that this post exists or that 3 other people were so convinced by it that they hit ‘like’.

Yes, Apollo 17 launched at night, but you do know the Earth revolves, right?

Just the slightest examination fo the trajectory and an understanding of how the world works should have prevented this stupidity from happening.

Lunokhod lunacy

Rasa is fond of citing Lunokhod as an example of how retroreflectors can be on the moon, claiming that they are an example of how they can be ‘placed’ there (somehow ignoring the fact the the mirrors are built into the Soviet rover and that their exact location was a mystery for years until they were found again by the LRO). That’s not what this post is about though - this one is about where he claims that the little rover that could managed to photograph stars.

They aren’t stars, they’re faults in the image. If they’re stars, you’d have no problem making the constellations out, and you wouldn’t also see them all over the lunar surface, and the rover’s landing vehicle (see left).

He’s also a little confused about the rover’s structure.

The “strange-shaped” shield isn’t a micro-meteorite protection. While it undoubtedly served as that when closed during the lunar night for insulation, it’s actually the solar panel that charged the rover’s battery when open during the lunar day.

The shape to which he’s referring is part of the rover, but isn’t the solar array (that was out of shot) - it’s more likely part of the antenna or one of the scientific instruments.

Finally, it’s not from a digital camera - they didn’t exist. The images are taken by TV cameras that transmitted back to Earth and were photographed off a screen. Oh, and any digital camera can photograph stars, as long as you can do long exposures and manual focus.

As always, his posts sound good to people who have no idea what he’s talking about. Sadly, neither does he.

Officially Stupid

Oh hey look, it’s 脚放在嘴里(or ‘foot in mouth’), yet again.

There’s a couple of things in this post that need addressing.

Firstly, the panels are not held on with Velcro. I have found one reference to that being the case other than the comment on that image, and it’s here. Note it’s not a NASA page, it’s a forum for space enthusiasts. Weirdly, the exact words used in that thread appear on that image, but that image is not used in the forum post (which, tellingly, he does not reference). He made it himself.

The panels were actually secured by rivets and were attached when inside the Saturn V stack at the last minute to allow people to work on the LM. The rivets on the obviously damaged LM panel are clearly visible (see below). The only conceivable use of Velcro here would be to attach the panels in a confined workspace before the rivets were used. The pattern of the damage itself reflects the positions of the rivets.

Secondly, this is very obviously not an ‘official’ response, as foot in mouth well knows. It’s something he does all the time - poisoning the well so that his dribbling sycophants will swallow his Kool Aid. Make it sound like it’s from some kind of ‘Official’ source and they’ll automatically distrust it.

NASA do not dignify hoax claims with responses. They have better things to do with their time than pacify morons, and do not need to arrange their activities to appease ill-informed simpletons.

Indian Dope Trick

This respondent to a facebook post thinks there’s something fishy about the lunar module descent stage photographed by Chandrayaan-2.

All he had to do was to find some stills of the TV footage taken after the ascent module returned to orbit and he’d have known what the ‘antennae’ were: RCS plume deflectors.

He could even have done some amateur photoshopping himself and compressed the elongated shadow to prove that the antennae are simply part of the remaining descent stage structure, like this on the right.

Naturally old foot in mouth weighs in with his view, shown on the right. He doubles down on it in a later post (see below).


I’m going to make this simple Rasa: this version of events is a lie.

You made it up. It’s false. It’s a complete fabrication and you know it, and you have no more evidence of this being true than you have of working for the CNSA. You’re a liar and a deluded fantasist conning your sycophants into believing you’re some kind of insider whistleblowing authority. You’re nothing of the sort.

Here’s the actual sequence of events: India released (for want of a better word) low resolution images of Apollo 11 and 12 in a web presentation in June 2021, and again for Apollo 11 in a different web presentation in September 2021. In early 2022 the high resolution versions of the landing sites were simultaneously released (without any kind of fanfare) on the Chandrayaan-2 website.

I know for a fact they were released simultaneously because I check there for new files daily. As a result, I was one of the first people to download and process those images and get them out publicly.

The XML data for the raw files show very clearly that the files were made at the same time for the website from original images taken three days apart.

It’s a little weird that the Apollo 12 image, complete with labelled footprints and equipment labels, was available at the same time as the Apollo 11 one in June, which completely contradicts Rasa’s version of events. Almost as if he’s completely and utterly wrong about everything.

Jarrah White makes lots of insinuations that these files were downloaded via NASA facilities, but he has no proof of it. Can we be certain? Why yes, yes we can.

The filenames here end in ‘D18’. If we look at the user guide for OHRC products, we see the key shown on the left. D18 is India’s DSN facility in Bangalore.

In fact, of the 94 OHRC files (47 pairs of raw and calibrated data), none went through the USA. Of 10202 (to date) lower resolution TMC files, 224 of them went via NASA, with each photographic target having between 2 and 6 raw and calibrated images. 40 TMC files went via Canberra.

So no, these two files were not routed through NASA, very few them were. Even if they were, there is absolutely no proof that they modified the files in any way, or encouraged India to do so. It’s desperate, dishonest straw-clutching of the worst kind.

Here are the two presentations compared - the earlier one is on the left.

Myers Mistake

Well this post didn’t last long, probably because even his own coterie of true believers were quick to point out how wrong his interpretation was.

The yellow arrow pointing horizontally across is just wrong - it assumes the shadow direction is caused by light from the right, rather than being cast from the rock directly in front of it.

Studio lights close to the photographer would produce divergent, not convergent shadows. Multiple lights would produce multiple shadows. The convergent lines are simply a product of perspective and camera lens.

His interpretation is at best a misunderstanding, at worst dishonest. Deleting the post is just downright cowardly.

Boot print Blunder

It’s almost a shame to post this, given that he’s trying to debunk the myth that you can’t make a clear boot print in lunar regolith, but he’s right for the wrong reasons entirely.

The reason you can compress a footprint in lunar soil has nothing to do with hydrogen and oxygen atoms making it ‘clumpy’. It has everything to do with the jagged, uneroded nature of the particles making them lock together, just like fresh volcanic soil. Additionally, there is nothing in the interstitial spaces in the regolith - ie, there’s no air or water to act as a resistance to the pressure from above and cause to rebound once the compressive force is removed.

The only possible ‘clumping’ he’s talking about would be from electrostatic charges, but that has nothing to do with how the regolith behaves under compression, and gas atoms and molecules are not going to be hanging around in there anyway.

Just bear that in mind the next time you hear him claiming he majored in astrophysics from the University of Oregon.

Contrasting stories

This meme appeared on their favourite facebook page, and as usual they seize on it like it’s a big “Gotcha” moment - even your favourite fake astrophysicist claims it as one of his first ‘smoking guns’.

A-ha! They say, NASA will have some convenient excuse, which will be [insert strawman here]. To be fair, some of them do try and come up with explanations about apertures and exposure settings, maybe some other aspect of photography.

None of them, however, come up with the actual explanation: both photographs have been processed to death.

Here are the originals, AS11-40-5688 and AS16-114-18469.

Not as big a difference now eh?

As usual, hoaxtards seek out the worst possible examples of a specific image that confirms their bias and don’t bother checking whether there are better ones out there.

The fact is, NASA don’t come up with any excuses or explanations for this- they have no need to appease morons.

It’s simple physics. Light is reflected. You can see things not in direct sunlight on the moon just like you can on Earth - it has nothing to do with atmospheric scattering and everything to do with light bouncing off surfaces. You’d think an astrophysicist would know that.

Inside Number 10

Conspiraloons have spotted a number on the moon during a live TV broadcast. Or have they?

Doubly Troubled

Jay here has questions about these rocks - they’re clearly different, so therefore fakery mumble mumble etc etc.

Is he right?

Well. He’s right, they are different rocks, but not because it’s a composite or anything - they’re different rocks in completely different places. Here they are in the full photos (right).

Notice what we can see of the LM: we’re looking at completely different sides of it. The rock in the picture on the left is waaaay over yonder to the right, off camera, in the other photo.

All you had to do was look at the photo properly, with eyes prepared to see, and you would have seen the answer to your question immediately.

Ironically, he even posted a panorama to ‘prove’ that they were the same rock, blissfully unaware that both rocks were in it in different locations. Here’s my version of that pan, with the two sets of split rocks circled.

Subsequent posts of his show that he’s got fixated on the tall, and very obviously portable object, which is the ALSCC, or Apollo Lunar Surface Close-Up Camera, which was moved around all over the place to take detailed close up photographs of the surface regolith, but which he obviously assumes to be in only one location.

Mirror Mirror

Seems Jay is also troubled by the way reflections behave. Let’s look at the two images full size to see if there’s a sensible explanation.

The seismic experiment didn’t “turn black”, it’s just reflective.

Anyone who knows how mirrors work knows that what you see in a reflection depends on the viewing angle, and in the two photographs the viewing angle is very different. On the left, the ground immediately in front of the experiment is in deep shadow (not to mention the sky it’s angled at). In the image on the right we’re very much looking side on, and side on in the distance we have the LRRR - white and bright, and that’s what we see reflected in the seismic experiment solar panels, along with the line of Aldrin’s shadow.

Aldrin’s suit (not Armstrong!) Is receiving light reflected back from the surface, which is why it isn’t also in deep shadow, and he isn’t illuminating the panels because he’s stood behind them.

Foiled again

Guess who’s back, back again. Well, he’s responding to someone else’s dumbfuckery but in so doing shows how little he knows or is prepared to find out, compared with what he likes to pretend he knows. Here’s the claim (shown right): a lunar module photo shows two different builds in two different photos, one taken by Michael Collins and one on the lunar surface. He’s referring to foil on the left hand side of the panels on that flat face. I’ve added my own zoom in for clarity.

Our old China chimes in claiming that it is visible, and even draws some helpful arrows to show where it is - initially saying that black foil was put on top of it, then pointing out where it supposedly is on both.

There’s just one problem with this detailed and thorough analysis: the LM has 4 sides, and we are looking at two different ones here. The lunar surface one is looking at the aft equipment bay, whereas the photo it’s being compared with is of the panelling covering the ascent module fuel tanks for the engine itself and the reaction control thrusters. It’s completely the wrong side of the LM.

If only he’d looked at the previous photograph ion the magazine (AS11-44-5926), he’d have seen that same flat panelling over the AEB and the silver foil.

Yet again hoaxers see what they want to see, not what’s there, and get fooled by their own lack of knowledge about the thing in which they claim such expertise.