When people believe strange things ...
Forty six years ago this week, Apollo 11's lunar module landed Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon, in one of the most incredible achievements in human history.
The fact that this was done tells you something and amazing and positive about the human race, but something equally amazing but negative is how many people, some of whom are otherwise highly intelligent, have managed to convince themselves of the absurd idea that the moon landings never happened and NASA pictures of them is all a gigantic hoax.
I was deeply shocked a little over a decade ago, during a casual conversation with a colleague who I knew from the quality of his work had a fully functioning brain, to discover that he was convinced that the moon landing films had been faked. Since then I have had an interest in why people believe strange things.
An amusing coincidence - which I am certain was not a conspiracy - is that after the experience of finding that an intelligent work colleague believed in this bizarre conspiracy theory had prompted me to buy David Aaronovitch's book on conspiracy theories, Voodoo Histories, the introduction to the book revealed that an almost identical experience - finding that an intelligent work colleague believed the same absurd conspiracy theory - had prompted him to write it.
David Aaronovitch did not attempt to find the flaws in the arguments put forward by his colleague Kevin but dismissed it on the grounds that there would have to be thousands of people involved in such a conspiracy - the astronauts themselves, everyone at what purported to be Mission Control, the set designers and builders for the fake moon set, the photographers, the Navy vessel who would have had to have pretended to fish the astronauts out of the sea. He argued that the chances that none of these people would have blown the conspiracy is negligible, and this was so obvious that the chances of any government risking the staging of a fake event so likely to be exposed is also negligible.
I regard that as a perfectly valid argument, but if you want to read the answers to the detailed allegations made by the Moon-landing-deniers, all the so-called "evidence" for the landings being faked is comprehensively debunked at several websites such as the Bad Astronomy site. Nevertheless the conspiracy theorists rumble on and this week Professor Brian Cox did not mince his words in his answer to them here.
The fact that this was done tells you something and amazing and positive about the human race, but something equally amazing but negative is how many people, some of whom are otherwise highly intelligent, have managed to convince themselves of the absurd idea that the moon landings never happened and NASA pictures of them is all a gigantic hoax.
I was deeply shocked a little over a decade ago, during a casual conversation with a colleague who I knew from the quality of his work had a fully functioning brain, to discover that he was convinced that the moon landing films had been faked. Since then I have had an interest in why people believe strange things.
An amusing coincidence - which I am certain was not a conspiracy - is that after the experience of finding that an intelligent work colleague believed in this bizarre conspiracy theory had prompted me to buy David Aaronovitch's book on conspiracy theories, Voodoo Histories, the introduction to the book revealed that an almost identical experience - finding that an intelligent work colleague believed the same absurd conspiracy theory - had prompted him to write it.
David Aaronovitch did not attempt to find the flaws in the arguments put forward by his colleague Kevin but dismissed it on the grounds that there would have to be thousands of people involved in such a conspiracy - the astronauts themselves, everyone at what purported to be Mission Control, the set designers and builders for the fake moon set, the photographers, the Navy vessel who would have had to have pretended to fish the astronauts out of the sea. He argued that the chances that none of these people would have blown the conspiracy is negligible, and this was so obvious that the chances of any government risking the staging of a fake event so likely to be exposed is also negligible.
I regard that as a perfectly valid argument, but if you want to read the answers to the detailed allegations made by the Moon-landing-deniers, all the so-called "evidence" for the landings being faked is comprehensively debunked at several websites such as the Bad Astronomy site. Nevertheless the conspiracy theorists rumble on and this week Professor Brian Cox did not mince his words in his answer to them here.
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