Air: We Never Went to the Moon pp. 36-55

 One of the most annoying things about this book is that it’s divided into chapters that are too short for a single post but too long to do two at a time. This chapter is a bit different because it becomes photo heavy.

“Here is shown that NASA has created the evidence for their conviction.”

Sentences like this drive me nuts, when my students try this kind of bullshit, I hit it with the red underline and a comment saying, “don’t do this.” There’s a much easier way to say this, “I will show evidence NASA faked the landing.” It’s much clearer. Instead, Kaysing tries to get profound and fails. The content of the words makes something profound not simply the construction.

If you’re familiar with this conspiracy theory, then you are going to be familiar with what follows: “The photographs presented here are in 4 groups showing the major areas of discrepancy.”

The shortness of this chapter makes sense because it’s not important what Kaysing is saying…not really. What matters is that he gives us pictures. He tells us that each photo is a “reproduction” of an original NASA photo, which again, is a just a weird way of saying that these are the “official photos.”

The photos are fine, in fact, unlike most of the pictures that I’ve seen in conspiracy books, these are actually superb quality (we’re on PDF page 38). The temptation for the debunker is to take the photos and explain one image at a time what is really happening. However, to do that, is to play into the conspiracy theorists’ hand. They want you to do that, because eventually there will be something you can’t explain. Saying “I don’t know” to a conspiracy theorist is admitting that they’re right…well, it’s not; but that’s how they take it. Conspiracy theories, as a concept, are desirable because they give an answer to everything. They are bad answers, but they are answers none the less.

The counter to this move is to get to the meta problem. Kaysing shows us four pictures of the LM (landing module) on the Moon with no disturbance underneath it. He then shows us six more pictures in group 2 titled “What Happened to the Dust?” Th final picture of group 2is Armstrong’s famous footprint with Kaysing’s caption, “The surface of the moon was so soft and dusty that the astronaut’s boot print sunk 1 to 2 inches into the surface.”

The conspiracy theory asks the question: why no dust? The problem that they are presenting is that if you blow really hard on a pile of sawdust, flour, baby powder, or a Scarface style mountain of cocaine—it plumes. It hangs around and gets on everything. I’ve done drywall, and just cutting sheetrock gets that stuff everywhere. One by one, I can go through the picture and try to find some dust; but I won’t be able to because the dust is going to get washed out by the light in the pictures anyway. The important factor that conspiracy theorists miss with regard to the craters is that there is no air on the moon.

No air means there is nothing for the moon dust to float on. It just drops to moon at the rate of gravitational attraction. There are no massive craters generated by the LM’s engines because the propulsion has no air to push into the surface of the moon, until they get into such proximity that the burning fuel physically touches the moon. The reason plaster gets in my hair, face, eyes, and lungs when I’ve cut sheetrock is because those particulates get in the air until they find something better to stick to. Without air, it falls. Every little issue that Kaysing brings up in these two sections is explained by the lack of any atmosphere.

The next two groups have to do with light. These are a bit more complicated to explain. What Kaysing is doing is anomaly hunting, he’s looking for things that seem odd to point out that they don’t meet with our expectations. Here’s the first problem: we can’t have expectations because Armstrong was literally the first human being to set foot on the Moon. He didn’t write up a detailed memoir of the experience before the second person Buzz Aldrin, put his foot down on it either. So, we have to take the experience as it is because there is no reference point.

Kaysing also has very little understanding of optical physics. I don’t either, I did some lighting work for video when I was in college and very little when I interned at a news station, but there are things that explain the issues Kaysing raises. In the second photo he captions, “In the photograph above the sun is directly behind the astronaut yet a bright reflection from his face shield.” It’s a terrible sentence, but we’ll let it pass. His point is that there should be no light reflecting back to the camera if it’s behind the photographer. What he fails to comprehend is that everything reflects light, unless you’re painting with Stuart Semple’s black #4, light is coming off. The white suit reflects light (that’s also why it’s white), the surface of the moon, and the shiny protective face shield. The latter especially as it is made to protect the wearer’s eyes by, get this, reflecting sunlight.

His final proof is the lack of stars in the photographs. This is easily explained by the light washing out the stars in the photos. If you have one bright source of light, then the dimmer sources just don’t appear. Take a photo of the moon with your camera: see any stars? No. Are you standing on a soundstage? Also, no. What’s happening is a very well-known photographic effect. If you want to take pictures of stars, then you need a special filter and you have to hold the shutter open. This was well known even when Kaysing is writing. Either he is ignorant of this phenomenon, or he hopes we won’t notice.

That’s the evidence he thinks establishes that the Moon landing never happened. It’s weak and easily debunkable. However, he’s going to treat this chapter as evidence so that he can move on to explain how the landing was faked. I’m very interested in this next chapter because in all my years of seeing this theory, I’ve never read how it was done other than “Stanley Kubrick did it.”

Also, we’re back to Wednesday posts starting on the 1/8.