11. Pasteur eyes

The next part of the broadcast doesn’t just contain claims that are nonsensical, it contains claims that are downright dishonest. It’s shoddy and shameful programme making at its worst.

The claim is this: As Apollo 8 flew over the moon it captured moving images of smoke rising from a chimney as Earth comes into view in a crater east of Pasteur. The supposed images are presented, first in black and white and then in colour, and they are described on camera by someone clearly stating that they are moving images. The sequence is intercut with audio of a mission stating that there is no smoke rising from Kepler crater as claimed by the USSR from its images - despite the fact that they are nowhere near Kepler crater. By the time any spacecraft is passing over Kepler Earth could not possibly be filmed just over the horizon, so there’s a nice bit of dishonest editing to start with.

Here are the images they use:

The intercutting of black and white and colour is also misleading, as is the claim that the rising smoke and chimney  is captured in moving images. Why? Because no such footage of an Earthrise exists from Apollo 8. Earthrises were captured in 16mm colour by later missions, but not at all by Apollo 8. Neither is it TV footage, because they only had a black and white TV camera and you can’t broadcast an Earthrise to Earth because you have to be able to see the Earth in order to broadcast to it.

The image they actually use is this one, AS08-14-2393, part of a sequence of frames taken at 22:30 on 24/12/68 that shows the final Earthrise captured by the crew. Shown next to that image below is my copy of another one in the sequence shown in a January 1969 copy of Life Magazine, where you would think you’d also be able to see a chimney and smokestack.

I’m not going to waste my time or yours showing you photographs from China or Japan, it’s so dishonest and so easily debunked it isn’t worth the effort.

It’s not even an original claim, it’s been made by people based on footage shown in a previous and genuine documentary (1999’s “To the Moon”) and debunked elsewhere, eg here, which showed that the speck came from the actual process of trying to reproduce the Earthrise moment. The best that they can do is admit to lazy, sloppy research, but the claim itself is a lie and they repeated it.

Seriously, if you buy into the smokestack claim, seek help, and if you already sought help then for Gods sake take your meds.

12. Pipe dreams

The next bit of lunacy (see what I did there?) revolves around a photograph ‘uncovered at JPL’ as they attempt to weave some kind of tenuous moon mining thread into their feeble narrative. They helpfully cut to a picture if JPL, as well as a picture of a planetary body with a probe around it in order to lend some impression of legitimacy to the story. The fact the probe they show is clearly labelled ‘Messenger’ and is in orbit around the planet Mercury has passed them by completely - such is the quality of their research and attention to detail.

The unattributed photograph shows an unnamed crater, from which supposedly extends a long pipeline that emerges some distance away. The pipeline supposedly carries the mined Helium-3 that the factories are processing. Or something.

The origin of the photograph isn’t clear, but I can tell you with some certainty that it is not from any of the Apollo missions, neither is it a Lunar Orbiter image. It is almost certainly taken by a terrestrial telescope, which means it is not secret at all, and while it is not the image used it certainly bears a strong similarity to one from Alter’s ‘Lunar Atlas’. Here are the two together.

Nope, no smokestack there.

If you watch the broadcast carefully, you will notice that you never see the Earth change height above the horizon as Apollo 8 supposedly moves over the surface. In fact, the illusion of movement is solely a product of the camera moving over the photograph - it is a complete fabrication.

If that smokestack is actually there, then surely it should also be visible in other Earthrise images taken on the same mission right? Well, it isn’t in the classic Earthrise shot AS08-14-2383- you know, the one that made all the newspapers and my copy of National Geographic (below left), nor can it be seen in previous orbits as shown in AS08-14-2385 (below centre). Nor is it in the Apollo 8 photography analysis (below right).

Nor can you see it in the same craters featured in Lunar Orbiter Earthrise image I-102-H2 in my photographic atlas.

A little more internet digging reveals that the claim that the photograph was ‘uncovered at JPL’ couldn’t be further away from the truth. It is actually this image, taken in 1894 by Austrian astronomer Maurice Loewy, published in this book in 1902.

You can buy an original print here.

Now that we know where it’s form, we can have a look at what they identify as the opposing ends of the pipeline in a composite of screenshots from the the broadcast.

Close examination of the main craters on show reveals that the only reason there appears to be a pipe in Manilius crater is because of the particular pattern of light and shade on it. Only a slight change in sun angle is required to reveal enough crater detail to show that it is just a shelf feature, something that is revealed in my image from Lick Observatory. Likewise at the other end of the ‘pipe’, it’s clear that there is no funnel shaped opening into the adjacent Mare Serenitatis, just a jumble of rocks in shadow.

Here’s the same view from Kaguya with the sun even higher in the sky that illustrates this perfectly:

If you use Japan’s 3DGIS viewer to get an oblique view of the western and eastern ends of the alleged pipe it becomes even more obvious:

To summarise, it’s not a pipeline, it’s not from a top secret photograph, and it’s not evidence of aliens mining the moon. It is, in fact, bollocks.

13. Asinine Aerial

For their next trick, Syfy draw our attention to what they identify as an aerial. As usual they don’t bother telling us which photograph the aerial is seen in, but they do tell us where: Sinus Medii, and hey helpfully show us the long view of it from lunar orbit. It doesn’t take long to identify the image as AS10-32-4820 (centre). Typically ,however, the image that they eventually zoom in on is AS10-32-4822 (below right), as shown in Richard Hoaglands book of nonsense ‘Dark Mission’.

And for completeness, here is China’s view.

I’ve also looked at Manilius before in connection with another stupid claim here, so you can see more views of the crater here. To save you the time, here’s India’s shot of it, as well as a general view of the area from Apollo 17 published in the Preliminary Science Report.

Ironically, the crater on the left is Murchison, and there is no sign in this image of the alien factory that the documentary claimed was there earlier. Who’d have thought it.

What’s even more hilarious is that in order to illustrate the location of the supposed aerial, they zoom in on this image before cutting to the actual location. Here’s the final zoom, together with the aerial view.

The funny part is that in their final zoom, there is absolutely no sign of the alleged aerial feature, which is supposed to be in the top centre of the left hand image. Their own programme debunks the stupidity of the claim. Just so we’re clear, here they are side by side:

Hoagland’s own book manages to debunk this bullshit by including a photograph of AS10-32-4819 with no antenna visible, as well as a full sized scan of 4822 that also doesn’t feature it. Here are the relevant bits of those images from my own copy of his ‘book’.

The ‘LA’ refers to the entirely imaginary city they think is there. By ‘imaginary’ I mean ‘utterly made up’, as can be proven very easily by anyone with a telescope:

Both of these amateur shots should reveal the city and the aerial. They don’t. Frankly, if these hoaxtards can’t even keep their own story straight I won’t bother with any Japanese or Chinese views - go back to the earlier bit on Murchison crater for those. This claim is just stupid.

14. Gum Disease

The next moon related claim (after a whole load of guff about a Phobos monolith and disappearing Martian probes) is of more structures, this time from an Apollo 15 image. Once again the image is not identified, but I tracked it down to AS15-M-2502. Here is the view presented by Syfy, together with the Apollo image, and a close up of the ‘building’. The are rotated so that they are looking south to match the view of probes..

By following the craters and other features, it is easy to work out that this ‘building’ is located between Mare Australis and Gum crater, near the lunar horizon. As usual we have excellent coverage of this are by probes from China (right) and Japan (left).

The buildings would be pretty much in the centre of these two satellite views, and it won’t take you too long to work out that the feature that helps form the apparent building is the bar feature running across the centre. There is certainly no actual building of any kind. The feature is also difficult to spot in the next photograph in the Apollo sequence as shown in ‘Apollo over the moon’, nor is it to be found in the Lunar Orbiter view of the region, or the Apollo 8 photograph that covers it AS08-12-2191.

The sad reality, particularly for everyone who has shelled out on the book of these ‘unidentified lunar objects’, is that this so called building is just a product of poor scans, crater walls viewed at an oblique angle and very careful and cynical image selection, combined with an over-active imagination and unwillingness to actually dig deeper than the superficial. No building in this photograph or any other.

15. Incredulous Copernicus

The next piece of moon madness relates to an Apollo 17 photograph showing Copernicus crater, and in this one the fevered brows of moon investigators have found what they believe to be wheels or domes acting as some sort of turbine. I say Apollo 17, and I say Copernicus, because the programme makers don’t - as usual they make no effort to identify the source of their image and even superimpose it over a photograph of the lunar far side to give the impression it’s some secret hidden spot. In fact Copernicus is one of the most obvious features on the near side, and this is the image they use AS17-151-23260.

It’s also very obviously not there in the high resolution scans of the image sequence at the ASU.

We’ll gloss over the fact that any photographs of this supposed structure are nothing like as clear as the Syfy image makes out (heaven forbid that they may have exaggerated the outlines to make it look better) and try and see where it is in relation to Copernicus. The quickest way to do this is to draw a box around it, then stretch the image to approximate what it would look like from above. Here they are correctly oriented:

So now we know where this thing is we can look at what other probes and telescopes have found, because it is so big it must surely be there! As usual we have Japan and China to choose from, and this time we have India too. China’s image will have to wait until their servers return.

No sign of it in modern probes, although to be fair China’s view isn’t up to much, how about older photographs like IV-121-H2, or this telescope view?

No big wheels there, and definitely none to be seen on Kaguya’s 3D GIS shot oriented in the same direction as the Apollo 17 photograph.

IN other words this feature, which the programme claimed is taller than the Sears tower in the US and in a perfectly visible part of the moon, just isn’t there. Yet again it is the product of light and shade and viewing angle and the cynically misleading interpretations of ‘experts’ with seemingly no expertise.

They make a further ludicrous claim about another feature found in the same image, this time a spacecraft of some sort.

Here’s the relevant part of the Apollo 17 image.

And here are India, Japan and China’s views respectively of the same place, with the green square identifying the location more precisely.

In common with the previous feature identified around Copernicus there is no sign of this mystery object in the 3D GIS view, again oriented to match the original NASA image.

Syfy also neglects to mention that there are two other photographs taken of the same area at the same time by Apollo 17, AS17-151-23265 and AS17-151-23266, neither of which show any sign of any wagon wheels or spacecraft. Nor can they be identified in the oblique images taken by Apollo 12 of Copernicus, or in any telescope or lunar orbiter shots, which they should be if they genuinely were standing proud of the surface rather than being just objects existing only in the imaginations of liars and idiots.

16. Dummies for Aliens

The final claim for this page relates to a supposed Apollo 20 mission to the lunar far side complete with an alien body. I’ve already taken this piece of crap apart on this page of my site, so I won’t waste too much time on it. Suffice to say it’s a fraud, and plenty of people as well as myself have shredded it to pieces already. What is worth briefly examining is the claim that an Apollo 15 image identifies a space ship near Izsak crater on the lunar far side.

The image commonly used is Panoramic image AS15–P-9630, but it appears on several Metric Camera images from Apollo 15 and 17, as well as number of Hasselblad ones, such as AS08-13-2256 and AS12-50-7447. Let’s be clear here, no one is claiming that the feature doesn’t exist. What is being denied is that it is a spaceship buried in the lunar surface, because that’s just dumb. So let’s have a look at the images involved. First of all, here is the Panoramic Camera image as usually presented (below left), compared with the one claimed to be taken by Apollo 20 (right).

Before we start posting other version of this crater, it’s worth pointing out that the crater rim seems to have undergone some sort of transformation between 1971 and the alleged 1976 landing, with quite a bit of reworking of the surrounding area. Some craters appear to have disappeared altogether, some have appeared out of nowhere, and some have moved quite some distance away. Far be it from me to suggest that someone has done some extensive Photoshop to make the feature look a bit more spaceshippy and stand proud of the surface, but someone has definitely done some extensive Photoshop work to do just that. In other words, they lied.  

We can start by looking at some more detailed Apollo images scanned by ASU of the same feature - first the Panoramic image, and then a Metric Mapping Camera one from Apollo 17.

Hmm - once the lighting changes it starts to look a little different. Still, we shouldn’t take NASA’s word for it right? Here is Japan’s view of the area (left) and China’s (right).

How weird is that, they are an exact match for the Apollo images, but don’t show any sign of any kind of spaceship at all. Let’s really double check by looking at different perspectives using Japan’s 3D application.

Yet again, no spaceship, no aliens, just variations in light and shade and ground contours and gullible idiots. NASA’s LRO can also make 3D images, and if you have time to download about 4Gb of data from China you can build them from their data too. Here they are, USA on top, China below:

There is no spaceship. Someone made it up.

This page is big enough now - let’s start a new one!