In actual fact, these alleged anomalies and impossibilities exist only in the opinion of people who are not experts in the relevant fields. Anyone who is professionally involved in photography, space technology or astronomy knows very well that what a layman might consider strange or implausible is instead exactly what science expects to occur in the unfamiliar environment of space and on the Moon.
Only incompetent amateurs question the authenticity of the Moon missions. In all the decades that have passed since the Apollo program, no real expert has ever raised documented doubts.
On the contrary, many of the apparent anomalies actually authenticate the visual record of the Apollo missions, as explained by Dennis Muren, winner of six Academy Awards for the visual effects of movies such as Jurassic Park, Terminator 2, The Abyss, E.T. and Star Wars:
“A moon landing simulation [produced with the special effects of the 1960s] might have looked pretty real to 99.9 percent of the people. The thing is, though, that it wouldn’t have looked the way it did. I’ve always been acutely aware of what’s fake and what’s real, and the moon landings were definitely real. Look at 2001 or Destination Moon or Capricorn One or any other space movie: everybody was wrong. That wasn’t the way the moon looked at all. There was an unusual sheen to the images from the moon, in the way that the light reflected in the camera, that is literally out of this world. Nobody could have faked that.”
– The Wrong Stuff, by Roger van Bakel, Wired (1993).
The second part of this book will sort the alleged hoax evidence into categories and debunk each claim systematically by using technical facts.
You probably won’t be surprised that the house of cards of the lunar conspiracists’ “evidence” ultimately collapses completely; but it’s very insightful to explore the nature of the recurring errors and patterns of thought on which these theories are based.
Moreover, disproving some of this evidence requires considerable research, especially because hoax theorists usually present documents, photographs and videos without specifying their source or the mission to which they relate, and also requires familiarity with the errors and deceptions often made by hoax theory proponents. This makes it hard even for many experts in astronomy or aerospace technology to find the exact technical explanation of some alleged anomalies and to provide accurate answers to the Moon hoax questions that often come up during their public talks.
One of the purposes of this book is to gather the explanations that have already been provided over the years and offer a handy guide to answering these questions.
NEXT: Chapter 5. Alleged photographic anomalies
