The How 4: A New How; We Never Went to the Moon pp. 71-80

 Our fourth explanation for how the Moon landing is faked is also our final section of this chapter. Remember that in the first three, we are all operating under a grand assumption that the author is taking as a fact, that the “Apollo Simulation Project” was real. I don’t mean, faking the Moon Landing, I mean the logistical angle for it all. He’s assumed the location, the base, the existence of the facility, and he’s even captioned one of the pictures he’s used for proof as an “author’s conception.” The conspiracy theory is an assumption as well, but that is the entire book in action. Here we need to consider the nuts and bolts of the theory and all he’s been telling us is this is what could be the case.

He’s claimed that the entire landing was faked in the Pacific, and I said he’s way overcomplicated that scenario. Now he’s got to explain how we the common folk know the Moon Landing happened. There are a few ways we know about it: photographs, radio transmissions, and television.

Kaysing already whiffed on his attempt at proving the photographs are fake. So we’ll pick up on his attempt to deal with the latter two.

Radio is difficult for the conspiracy theory for two reasons: the first is that it exists and the second is that anyone can pick it up. With a little know-how you can also figure out where the signal came from. The former problem is easily remediable, you just broadcast the fake signal. Again, Kaysing over-complicates the conspiracy, “Secret, leased and well-secured telephone lines were connected to the antennae inputs of all space communication centers. These included the major tracking stations in Australia, Africa, and the west coast of the United States.”

It’s a pet peeve of mine when people refer to “Africa.” Africa is the second largest inhabited continent on the planet, it’s enormous. You can fit all of the United States, China, India, and the entire European continent inside its landmass. When he writes about tracking stations in Africa, he needs to be more specific. At least when he says “Australia” which is a very large place too, it’s one country.

That aside there doesn’t need to be a wired antennae input. Just broadcast the waves. I don’t quite understand what he’s getting at. He’s claiming that there is some wired network extending to three different continents. To repeat, Africa is enormous, so we have a telephone line that runs from the Western United States, to Australia, and then to somewhere in Africa. This is the plan he’s offering. It’s even sillier when he addresses the latter problem with radio broadcasts: amateur radio operators.

This isn’t much of a hobby nowadays, but you can still find some very dedicated radio people tinkering around. There are subreddits for this kind of thing and they’d definitely be looking around for the Apollo transmissions. It would definitely be a feather in their cap (as they said in the 60s) to have recorded the transmissions. Kaysing’s work around is that “identical broadcasts were made from an orbiting satellite. So perfect were all of these simulations, that the momentary blackout when the module was supposed to be behind the moon was faithfully reproduced.”

In order to fake the transmissions from space to the communication centers they needed wired phone lines. To fool the amateur radio operators, they used a second identical broadcast from a satellite. Alright, this raises the obvious question: why not just use the one satellite broadcast? Further, you don’t actually need those tracking stations either, like the Naval ship that picks up the capsule—it only needs to exist on paper. The less people involved, the better the secret. I also think that it’s very funny that Kaysing thinks that a point of perfection in the fakery is that for a brief period of time, they just shut the system off.

The television broadcast is a strange section because instead of offering how the broadcast was faked, Kaysing instead focuses on the same details as he did on the pictures. There is an entirely black background, the moon surface was firm, the LEM, etc. which he attributes to talented set designers from science fiction movies. The important part is not what we saw, but how we saw it. Where did the transmission come from that was able to be broadcast in so many homes around the globe? How was that part faked? While it may seem that the pictures themselves are important, the origin is more important. This wouldn’t be hard for Kaysing to make up either, just cite the network of secret satellites. He says that he’s got images next to Hollwood productions in five pages…so I skipped ahead. None of these photos do the work that Kaysing thinks they do.

One photo show how Kubrick was able to film a descent to the Moon for 2001. He used a special magnifying camera on a very detailed photograph of the Moon. So, this proves one thing, that Kubrick was able to make his movie look like the real thing. It could prove the reverse, but there needs to be more information for that claim to hold water. Just because 2001 came out first (1968) does not mean that the Moon landing was faked. Just because it looks real, is only a testament to the detail that Kubrick put into the movie. Jules Verne’s “From the Earth to the Moon” gets some details of space flight right (weightlessness in space for example) before anyone else does not prove that there was no space flight. The entire section with the photos is like this, it’s a series of pictures that claim two things look similar and one of them is definitely fake, so the other is as well. There’s also a random magazine cover which claims to expose the Soviet fake Moon Landing, but this was never a thing to begin with and it’s pretty irrelevant here.

Kaysing wraps up this chapter with two sections. The first is titled “Planning and Special Projects” and begins, “This department was charged with the overall responsibility for planning and direction of the simulation.” What department is he talking about? Was this the Planning and Special Projects department? I thought ASP was in charge, but apparently it was not. This is a dizzying conspiracy.

The next section is about the public relations. He writes, “The astronauts and their families as viewed through a bottle of syrup.” I don’t understand this phrase; I think it’s supposed to be a compliment, but I don’t get it. Maple syrup? We view them as brown and hazy; that doesn’t seem right.

He’s got a whole thing about the media blitz and thinks this is suspect. It’s not though. It was an event so major in world history that no other country has replicated it yet. It’s a literal cultural achievement in every Civilization game. Of course, the country that did it first would brag about it.

The chapter ends with something that I think Kaysing thought was clever. He lists time stamps for events of the launch and then writes a commentary that proves it’s true. The story is more detailed than anything offered before, i.e. he claims that the listening station in Africa is now in Johannesburg South Africa. What I quibble with is that this wasn’t named earlier. Rather than be in space the astronauts are in the underground bunker with “a few of the shapeliest showgirls from Las Vegas, cleared for secret of course.”

He means prostitutes. This is entirely unnecessary and only exists to inflame the titillation and outrage of the reader.

It’s just a boring section. I think it would have worked better if this list was the chapter itself. Each milestone broken down and commented on with more detail. This reads as a summary with a “oh I forgot to mention this” earlier. Like a five-year-old repeating a joke.

I was expecting more details, but those are coming apparently. I used to like the layout of this book. It seems that now, he’s going to say a thing in the very beginning, expand on it a bit, and then really expand on it. Our next chapter is titled “Visual Aspect of Simulation.” Grammar aside, this is just more photograph analysis, but we’ll take that next week.